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Henry Green is renowned for being a “writer’s-writer’s writer” and a “neglected” author. The two, it would seem, go hand in hand, but neither are quite true. This list of reasons to read Henry Green sets out to loosen the inscrutability of the man and his work.

The post You have to read Henry Green appeared first on OUPblog.

In Love by Alfred Hayes was first published in 1953. Set in post-war New York it isn’t really about being in love at all. Rather, it is about how we go about convincing ourselves we are in love and then using that so-called love as a weapon. That makes the book sound dangerous, doesn’t it?

The story begins with our main character, approaching forty, sitting in a bar and having a drink with a young, pretty girl. It’s a bit confusing at first because the man is narrating and slips between talking to the pretty girl, addressing her as “you,” and being in his head which amounts to talking to the reader though we are never addressed directly. Along with this we slip between present and past as he begins to recall another pretty girl he used to know and thinking that he made a big mistake that he will always regret. Then he tells the story of that other pretty girl. This is the bulk of the book and it is told from our man’s perspective in a straightforward narrative style.

He and the girl, I don’t ever recall that they either of them get named, were seeing each other for sometime. The girl, not a girl really but a young woman in her early twenties, has a daughter who is being raised by her grandparents after the woman and her husband divorced. She is trying to work in the city and earn money but it is a grim sort of life. Our narrator is a nice enough fellow and the pair convince themselves that they are in love. But they aren’t, not really. They use each other to make their lives less miserable, to fill the void of loneliness.

And then one evening, out with some friends, the woman meets Howard, a wealthy businessman who asks her to dance. Howard takes a shine to her and as they dance he offers her $1,000 to spend the night with him. That is a lot of money to her and even though she is tempted she refused. Still, Howard gives her his number in case she changes her mind. From here the relationship between our narrator and the woman enter into a death spiral that neither of them wishes to acknowledge until both of them are so messed up that there is no chance to set things right again.

If you are thinking, wow this sounds like that movie with Robert Redford and Demi Moore, Indecent Proposal, you are kind of right. Except the movie was based on Jack Engelhard’s 1994 novel by the same name and besides the offer of money the two books are completely different.

Our woman of course, calls Howard. They go out but nothing happens immediately. Howard actually likes her and instead of just going to bed with her, he treats her like a lady, wining and dining, buying her presents, making her feel loved. And our narrator, all along he knows that if he’d only say something to her, say he loved her, she would stop seeing Howard, wouldn’t have called him to begin with. As she slips farther and farther away from him he gets bitter and angry and places all the blame on her. And when she tells him she won’t be seeing him anymore, it pushes our narrator to over the edge:

I began, too, to experience the conceit of suffering. it conferred upon me a significance my emotions had previously lacked. It seemed a special destiny. Because I suffered I thought I loved, for the suffering was the proof, the testimony of a heart I had suspected was dry. Since happiness had failed me, it was unhappiness that provided me with the belief that I was, or had been, in love, for it was easier to believe in the reality of unhappiness when I had before me the evidence of sleepless nights and the bitterness of reaching in the dark for what was no longer there. The strict constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself.

Since the story is told in hindsight, our narrator makes it clear throughout that he has thought long and hard about what happened and why and how it is that he finally ends up hurting her with his desire to destroy any hope for happiness she might have. It doesn’t make the story any less emotionally brutal, nor did I end up having much sympathy for the narrator. I understood him and his motives but understanding did not melt into sympathy.

In Love is a slim book, more novella than novel and it is astonishing just how much is packed into it. I feel like I read a much longer book. Kudos once again the the NYRBs Classics folks for another good subscription selection.

What a good story The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf turned out to be. What’s not to like about a story with the Devil himself and spiders in it? It was even a little creepy at times.

The story begins with a christening. After much eating, the celebrants push themselves away from the table for a little walk to make room for more food. One of them notices an old black post in the window frame of this lovely new house and asks Grandfather about it. And boy, does Grandfather have a tale to tell!

Long ago a powerful knight named Hans von Stoffeln took possession of the land and the peasants of the area. He decided he needed a new castle, bigger and better than the old one, and forced the peasants to build it for him on top of a barren hill. After long and hard labor during which the peasants were forced to neglect their own fields and families and come near to starvation, the castle was finished. But the knights made fun of von Stoffeln and his castle on the barren hill, so von Stoffeln decided he needed an avenue of one hundred trees. He ordered the peasants to uproot trees from miles away and bring them to the castle and plant them in an avenue. This work had to be done within a month’s time. The peasants were beside themselves, worn out and hungry their carts and tools and animals on the verge of falling apart and collapse, what were they to do?

Suddenly in their midst appears a hunter dressed in green with a “beard so red it seemed to crackle and sparkle like fir twigs on the fire.” He offers to help but the peasants, unable to see how a huntsman could help them, refuse. The green man chides them, tells them he can make their work fast and easy for only a small payment: an unbaptized child. Horrified, the peasants refuse again.

The next day they begin their work and it quickly becomes clear that they will not be able to complete the task in the allotted time. But Christine, a “frightfully clever and daring woman” decides that they can beat the Devil at his own game and convinces the men to agree to the offer of help. The Devil seals it with a kiss on Christine’s cheek. Suddenly the work becomes easier and the peasants complete their task so quickly that they have time to start work in their own fields.

But soon the time for the first baby to be born draws near. Christine, who is the midwife, plans on having the priest present at the birth so the baby can be immediately baptized and saved from the Devil’s clutches. The plan works. But then Christine’s cheek where the Devil had kissed her starts burning. A small black mark appears on it. As the time for the birth of the next baby arrives the black mark has grown bigger. As the woman gives birth inside the house with the Priest present, Christine is outside in the midst of her own labor except instead of birthing a baby, she gives birth to one large spider and thousands of tiny ones from the black mark on her face. It is a gruesome scene:

And now Christine felt as if her face was bursting open and glowing coals were being birthed from it, quickening into life and swarming across her face and all her limbs, and everything within her face had sprung to life, a fiery swarming all across her body. In the lightning’s pallid glow she saw, long-legged and venomous, innumerable black spiderlings scurrying down her limbs and out into the night, and as they vanished they were followed, long-legged and venomous, by innumerable others.

These spiders first killed all the peasants’ livestock. And the peasants, placing all the blame on Christine, now start to plan on how to get their hands on the next baby before the priest can baptize it.

Isn’t this a delicious story? You will have to read it yourself to find out what happens and what it has to do with the black post at the beginning of the story. It is safe to say that the Godly win. And, of course, as long as the people in the valley remain Godly they have nothing to fear from the spider. We are reminded that inborn purity, like family honor,

must be upheld day after day, for a single unguarded moment can besmirch it for generations with stains as indelible as bloodstains, which are impervious to whitewash.

Of course it is the clever woman, Christine, who persuades the men to allow evil into the community. And generations later when the spider strikes again it is also women who are at the root of its reappearance. But you know Eve set the precedent in the Garden so the fault is always with the women because men just can’t say no to their persuasive powers. Given that the story was originally written in 1842 the sexism can be noted but tolerated and the story enjoyed for its delicious horrors.

I can chalk this one up as another RIP Challenge read as well as mark it down as my NYRB subscription October read. Woo! Two birds, one stone and all that. The Mysteries of Udolpho is almost done too. Next week for sure. I’d say I am doing really well with my October reading plan but I don’t want to jinx myself. Oops, I think I just did.

For a person like me who has a tendency to get nightmares from supernatural and gory slasher type horror, psychological horror along the lines of Shirley Jackson is more than sufficiently creepy and delicious. So when I learned about Thomas Tryon’s The Other and saw it noted as a worthy descendent of Jackson I suspected I was in for a treat. Boy, was I! In fact, I put it in the top five best books I’ve read for the RIP Challenge ever.

The book begins with an unnamed narrator who is clearly in some sort of institution. It isn’t long before we figure out it is a mental institution. But who is this person? He is forty-eight-years old and has one of those smooth and slippery voices that ask you to trust him but you can’t quite because there is something not right that you just can’t put your finger on. Very soon he addresses us directly as he begins to tell the story of the Perry family. And not long after that we know this is one of the Perry twins, but is it Niles or Holland?

Then we move back in time to when Niles and Holland were twelve and thirteen, living on the family farm in the small Connecticut town of Pequot Landing. Their father was killed in the fall of the previous year in a tragic accident. When he was carrying a bushel of apples down into the apple cellar, the heavy trapdoor in the floor of the barn smashed down on his head, sending him to his death on the concrete floor below. Now the boys’ mother is in such deep grief she hardly leaves her room. The boys are looked after by their grandmother, their aunt and uncle who also have a boy a few years older than Niles and Holland, and the housekeeper. The twins’ pregnant older sister and her husband are also living at the farm.

While the perspective shifts around, much of the story is told from the viewpoint of Niles. He is the younger twin, born on the other side of midnight. He is also the angelic good twin while Holland has a mean streak. Just how mean? Right away we are treated to the story of Holland hanging his grandmother’s cat in the well. And not long after that story we see him kill his cousin’s pet rat by feeding it poison. Good twin, bad twin.

Yet Niles idealizes Holland. Holland inherited the family ring with the peregrine falcon on it from his father but he gave it to Niles who carries it around in an old tobacco tin because no one is supposed to know he has it. Also in the tin is The Thing, wrapped in blue tissue paper.

And then people start dropping like flies, all of them meeting their end in a freak accident of one kind or another. Niles suspects Holland is behind everything but Niles will keep his brother’s secrets.

The story keeps unfurling with things getting worse and worse and now and then we return to the present with the twin in the asylum but still don’t know which twin. It must be Holland, right? But no, maybe not. And the dead pile up and something is not right, something about what we are being told in the story isn’t meshing, but what is it?

And then, about two-thirds of the way through the book you find out and it’s a surprise but not a surprise because, like the adults in the story, you knew but you just couldn’t believe it because the truth is too horrible. But after the revelation you can’t ignore the truth any longer. And the rest of the book carries you along unrelentingly in this horrible thing right to the very end. I found myself muttering as I read, “oh no, oh no, oh no.” And once in awhile I noticed my hands shaking and my heart beating just a little faster. When I read the last page my “oh no” changed to “oh wow” and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. It’s that kind of book.

Please excuse me while I do a little happy dance over finishing The Crisis of the European Mind by Paul Hazard

What to say about a book that covers European intellectual history from 1680-1715? Judging from all my page points there is a lot and I’d like to tell you about some of the fascinating things I learned but I will save specifics for another post or two.

What I will say today is that this is a heady book. It is not a hard or complicated read nor is it slow, ponderous and dull. It moves along at a good clip and is filled with Hazard’s delightful wit and sarcasm. But it also requires attention and regular and sustained reading. I had a hard time at first because there are breaks within the chapters and I would stop reading there and not get back to the book for a few days. Bad, bad, bad. I’d find I had lost the thread and would have to go back a page or two and reread to pick it up again. Far better to read in chapter chunks. The chapters can be long though so I had to make sure to not let more than a day pass before getting back to it.

What Hazard does in this book is really interesting. He aims to show all the elements that lead into the Enlightenment period, how they were brewing long before the period and from what quarters they were bubbling up. It is ambitious. Does he succeed? Mostly.

I am not an expert on the period, my assessment comes from whether I feel like I know more about it now than I did before. And I do. I haven’t quite connected all the dots yet though. That’s where Hazard sort of slips. There is so much going on at once in so many different countries that no matter how the book is organized it would make for some difficulties. Hazard chose to not use chronology but more of a general and broad view of religion, politics, science, philosophy, art and literature. And because of this I can’t say what ideas came up first or were circulating at the same time in the different areas of thought. I can generally see how they influenced each other but that’s about it. A dated timeline would have been most helpful. If I had known of that fact early on I could have made my own timeline as I went along.

Hazard is strong on his analysis of philosophy, science and religion, weak on politics and literature.

What was really interesting was looking at ideas in their infancy that were later more fully developed in the Enlightenment period and that influenced Thomas Jefferson and other American founders. Also fascinating was how some of the things people argued about then we are still arguing about today, specifically in matters of religion and science and the role of each in society. One would hope that we might have progressed in our thinking over all this time, come to some conclusions or at least a balance. Nope. We still struggle with the same issues especially when it comes to making a god of science.

If you find yourself in the mood for a good history book that doesn’t have to do with Kings and Queens and wars and peace but ideas, then this is the book to go to. Now I am going to go see if I can’t put together some particular thoughts on particular moments in the book to share in another post or two.