Plainsong, by Kent Haruf

I've been living in cities for too long, and I've gone soft.  The plain in this novel's title refers to the flatlands in eastern Colorado, where people raise livestock and crops, not high-rise buildings and investment schemes. When I was very young, my father was a large-animal vet in a very small dairy-farming village. A different topology from Haruf's fictional town of Holt, but with the same sort of earthy, mostly very decent people.

Haruf's scenes of cattle ranchers pulling a contorted calf from a cow's prolapsed uterus using a heavy calving chain made me want to wail and scream, as did his description of a horse going down and dying from an intestinal torsion.  The details of the vet's on-the-spot autopsy were... vivid.  As I was blanching and cringing, though, I could hear my late father's snorts of derision. Life in the big city?  This is life in the big country. And it's often bloody and rough. Oddly enough, though, ranchers and farmers -- unlike urbanites -- tend to develop callouses on their hands rather than their hearts and minds.

Mr. Haruf has pulled off a mean feat with the characters in Plainsong:  They are deeply lovable without being saccharine sweet and memorable despite having no pronounced character quirks. They are ordinary people writ large and splendidly drawn.

Victoria Roubideaux is 17 and pregnant, locked out of her home by her mother, who is still bitter about her alcoholic husband's abandonment. Victoria seeks shelter with one of her schoolteachers, Maggie Jones. Maggie shares a house with her elderly, senile father and can't shelter the girl for long. In what is either a stroke of genius or a moment of lunacy, she decides to ask a pair of gruff old cattlemen -- the McPheron brothers, who never married and live together on a ranch well outside of town -- if they might be able to give shelter to the pregnant teen. Raymond and Harold McPheron politely listen to her proposition, assure her they'll consider it, and proceed through the day's chores without another word about it. As evening falls, Harold is stunned to realise that his brother is actually thinking of taking the girl in.

...why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don't amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?
I can't say, Raymond said. But I'm going to. That's what I know.
And what do you mean? How come she wouldn't be no trouble?
I never said she wouldn't be no trouble. I said maybe she wouldn't be as much trouble.
Why wouldn't she be as much trouble? As much trouble as what? You ever had a girl living with you before?
You know I ain't, Raymond said.
Well, I ain't either. But let me tell you. A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose. And goddamn it, there's the baby too. What do you know about babies?
Nothing. I don't even know the first thing about em, Raymond said...

...You're getting goddamn stubborn and hard to live with. That's all I'll say. Raymond, you're my brother. But you're getting flat unruly and difficult to abide. And I'll say one thing more.
What?
This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.
No, it ain't, Raymond said. But I don't recall you ever attending Sunday school either. 

Another Holt family consists of Tom Guthrie, also a teacher at the high school, his sons Ike and Bobby (9 and 10 years old and inseparable), and his estranged wife, a shadowy figure whose emotional stability seems to increase in direct proportion to the distance she can put between herself and them.  When the novel opens, she has withdrawn to the darkened guest room bed and can barely manage to get out of it. She progresses to a small rented house in Holt, and then to her domineering older sister's apartment in Denver, with her husband and sons doing their best to understand and carry on.

Bobby and Ike have daily paper routes, so they set out early each morning on their bicycles to collect the papers from the train station and then pedal around the town to deliver them. On Saturday mornings, they go to the doors to collect payment for the week's papers. They approach Iva Stearns' place with dread. An overweight, cranky woman who shuffles around her cluttered apartment with the aid of two canes, always wearing the same house dress and apron, Iva peppers them with seemingly random questions. They are too young to understand that, despite her grouchy demeanour, she is truly lonely and starved for company, even that of two little boys. Ostensibly to save herself the effort of getting out of her chair to answer the door, she gives them a key to her apartment and tells them to come in whenever they'd like to. When their mother leaves town for Denver, Bobby and Ike find themselves dropping in to visit old Mrs. Stearns. She sends them to the grocer to buy a few ingredients for oatmeal cookies. As the crotchety old woman talks them through the recipe, it becomes evident that her intentions go beyond giving the boys a treat to console them on that afternoon. She's teaching them some survival skills for a life without mother.

All right, she said. You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that. I'm not just talking about here. When you go home too. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Meanwhile, the McPheron brothers report to Maggie Jones that Victoria goes straight into her room after washing the supper dishes every evening. Maggie wonders if they talk to her. They look at Maggie and each other with soup-plate eyes. Talk to her? About what?!  That evening, Harold summons his courage to initiate a conversation by asking Victoria for her opinion on buying or selling soybeans, based on the day's commodities report. To her eternal credit, Victoria asks him for more information on the subject, and both brothers eagerly set out to discuss with her the business of farming.

Now you want to sell some of it off. So you call up the elevator and tell him to sell off five thousand bushel, say. So he sells it at today's prices and then the big grain trucks, those tractors and trailers you see out on the highway, they haul it away.
Who does he sell it to? the girl said.
Any number of places. Most likely to the milling company. Mostly it goes for your baking flour. Then when do you get your money? He writes you out a check today. Who does that? The elevator manager. Except if there's a storage charge, Harold said, taking his turn again. He takes that out. Plus your drying charge, if there is one. Only, since it's wheat we're talking about, there's never much drying charge with wheat. Mostly that's with your corn.
They stopped again and studied the girl once more. They had begun to feel better, a little satisfied with themselves. They knew they were not out of the woods yet, but they had begun to allow themselves to believe that what they saw ahead was at least a faint track leading to a kind of promising clearing. They watched the girl and waited...
And so the two McPheron brothers went on to discuss slaughter cattle and choice steers, heifers and feeder calves, explaining these too, and between the three of them they discussed these matters thoroughly, late into the evening. Talking. Conversing. Venturing out into various other matters a little too. The two old men and the seventeen-year-old girl sitting at the dining room table out in the country after supper was over and after the table was cleared, while outside, beyond the house walls and the curtainless windows, a cold blue norther began to blow up one more high plains midwinter storm.

Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by William Maxwell

A few months ago, I shipped an antique Bhutanese dressing gown from Kuala Lumpur back to its owner in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.  By way of thanks, he sent me three books by Sylvia Townsend Warner, including this collection of her letters.  Not only did Professor Davidson hit my literary tastes right on the nose, the gift card offered an example of his exquisite penmanship.  The combination of these two items makes me realise that both are on the cusp of oblivion:  so few of us write anything by hand any more that our collective penmanship has gone to the dogs. Moreover, the advent of e-mail has made letters seem more archaic than Peter's dressing gown. My generation is the last to have corresponded by post on a regular basis, and I've always loved reading collections of letters, a genre that is now extinct.  I suppose publishers could collect authors' e-mail messages, but I doubt they'll be of the calibre that writers previously committed to paper.

My dear, bookish friend Mark introduced me to STW. I was reading T. H. White's The Once and Future King at the time and was raving about it over cocktails. Mark mentioned that STW had written a remarkable biography of White, and had I read it?  I hadn't, and I immediately added it to my 'must read' list.  In early August, I came across a copy of Lolly Willowes so read that instead.  Shortly after that, the parcel arrived from Aberdeenshire with this collection of letters, The Kingdoms of Elfin (a collection of short stories published late in her life), and a book about Somerset.

Because collected letters are to a number of different recipients, they illuminate multiple facets of their writer, and these show STW to be a polymath, a polyglot, a generally erudite individual.  Her letters to Paul Nordoff, a composer, indicate her own knowledge of musical history and composition. To other writers and editors, she reveals the depth and breadth of her reading. Her passion for nature bubbles up in nearly every letter she wrote, and her unshakeable love for Valentine Ackland is as constant in her correspondence as it was in her life.

Sylvia met Valentine, a poet, in 1930.  Except for a short hiatus (when Valentine carried on with a younger American woman), they lived together until Valentine's death from cancer in 1969.  As I read the letters, it struck me how openly Sylvia discussed their relationship, making clear in her letters that they not only shared a house and a life but also a bed -- all the more remarkable when contrasted with Alan Turing's prosecution for homosexuality in 1952.  Although certainly never solemnised in a church, Sylvia and Valentine's partnership was a marriage, and the letters Sylvia wrote at the time of Valentine's death reduced me to aching tears.

To Paul Nordoff (composer), 5 January 1946.  Rest assured she read "the whole of Balzac" in the original French.

Last winter I read the whole of Balzac -- except Seraphita; and was left with my mouth as open as the Queen of Sheba's... Have you ever thought of making an opera from Balzac? La Duchesse de Langeais, for instance, or Ferragus, any of the impassioned social ones, ought to work up into a grand opera like eggs into a sauce Bernaise, the duchesses so shrillingly soprano, the villains so profoundly basso, the situations floating in moonlight and limelight, and Balzac's genius roaring through it all like a quartet of saxophones. A total absence of refinement... I suppose that is his secret. All I know for certain is that the works of Balzac kept me from death last winter.  

Again to Paul Nordoff dated 1 December 1946 she writes about her Somerset book project. (A copy of the result is now on my bookshelf, and at first glimpse, I would say she did in fact "manage to do better".)

... a commission to write a small book about Somerset. Just now I am in the midst of reading the many books about Somerset which have already been written. I am consoled for the numerousness by not finding one among them that I can enjoy. They all hurry like anxious Satans over the face of the earth, and never once do these breathless authors stop in a wood and smell the smell of the country. I hope I shall manage to do better.  

 Editor William Maxwell (who, as editor of the New Yorker also published many of STW's short stories) labels one letter as "To a friend who had inconveniently fallen in love", dated 11 May 1951.  Sylvia and Valentine had just recently reunited after the latter's dalliance.

...say no more, think no more, about perhaps losing [    ] to someone else. To think of losing is to lose already. To consider a rival fattens an insubstantial into a real being. Since you are in the river, darling, SWIM! And if that hypothetical younger person comes into your mind, think of me. Here I am, grey as a badger, wrinkled as a walnut, and never a beauty at my best; but here I sit, and yonder sits the other one, who had all the cards in her hand -- except one. That I was better at loving and being loved.  

As a woman who lived outside the social norms, STW was sympathetic to others who did the same, especially women. This is a letter to Dorothy Hoskins on 30 July 1954.

...I find drinkers very congenial. There is a generosity in their recklessness. We had a drinking old lady as a neighbour for many years, and I had the greatest esteem for her because she knew what she wanted (not many women do), and was so grandly ready to hazard her health, her last thirty shillings (she was very poor), her peace of mind (for, pious pressure being what it is, she was always exposed to waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, I've done for myself, I shall fall into the oilstove or get cancer), for what she really wanted. As for respectability, and all that, she had thrown it away long ago. In the upshot, she was very well thought of by all the village boys, who ran her errands and ate her apples, and died as tidily as you could wish of heart failure. If there is a heaven, I am sure she went there like a cork from a champagne bottle.   

The letters that STW wrote at the time of Valentine's death are truly remarkable. Her grief takes on a beautiful form, and her love just radiates from them, undiminished. She wrote to William Maxwell on 11 November 1969, two days after Valentine died in their home.

...This evening her coffin was carried out of the house and put in a forget-me-not blue van -- which would have surprised her. I heard her spirit laughing beside me.
I am passionately thankful that she is out and away, and that in a fashion we are back where we were, able to love freely and uncompromised by anxiety and doubtful hopes and miseries of frustration. One thinks one has foreseen every detail of heart-break. I hadn't. I had not allowed for the anguished compassion and shock of hearing her viola voice changed to a pretty, childish treble, the voice of a sick child.
Death transfigured her. In a matter of minutes I saw the beauty of her young days reassert itself on her blurred careworn face. It was like something in music, the re-establishment of the original key, the return of the theme.
Don't think I am unhappy and alone, dear William. I am not. I am in a new country and she is the compass I travel by.  

And on 27 November 1969, she wrote to two sisters and long-time friends, Marchette and Joy Chute.

My dear Darlings,
Your kind hearts will want to know how I am getting on.
Well, not too badly for a one-winged partridge (did you know the partridge is the emblem of fidelity?). There is a great deal to do, which I am thankful for, but as I slog on doing it I am revived by coming on fragments by her, letters, passages copied from everyone you can think of, feathers (she loved all small feathers) deposits in pockets, always including a pencil & a pocket comb, but also including lumps of sugar in case of a deserving horse, chocolate drops for dogs, interesting pebbles, small notes from me on the lines of 'Remember to have coffee' 'Keep warm' 'Come back soon'.
Her love is everywhere. It follows me as I go about the house, meets me in the garden, sends swans into my dreams. In a strange, underwater or above-earth way I am very nearly happy. 

This is a book that one can (and I will) pull off the shelf, open to a random page and be sure of finding something delightful. Given the prodigious numbers of letters that STW wrote, William Maxwell did an outstanding job of editing this collection, both in terms of selecting letters and passages and leaving the original text intact. STW once groused, "USA publishers have a habit of what they call 'editing in accordance with American procedure'. This means they rearrange one's paragraphs, alter one's punctuation, and generally bedevil the text."  Mr. Maxwell, her long-time editor and friend, humbly remarked, "I have tried not to bedevil the text."

The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

A few years ago, I read what is probably Maugham's best-known book, Of Human Bondage and was less than thrilled with it. I seem to remember flipping through somewhat impatiently, wishing that the narrator would pull himself together and take charge of his life rather than tormenting us readers with his gloomy and miserable introspection for several hundred pages.

Since then, I've resolved to give each book a fair chance, and if it hasn't convinced me that I should spend more time with it after, say, the first 100 pages, I'm going to set it aside. There are two drawbacks to this plan. First, e-books have no page numbers, so it's a matter of guesswork when I have reached the 100-page mark, and second, setting a book aside unfinished leaves me feeling not resolute but defeated. I just enforced this new policy on Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, and especially after being so enthusiastic about The Heart of the Matter, I felt sure this was my failure, not Mr. Greene's.

The Razor's Edge was on Anthony Burgess' trusty list of 99 best novels, and this list has served me well, so I gave it a go. I loved it. It was a timely reminder that we rarely respond consistently to an author's various works. I've given unbroken thumbs up to Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell, and equally persistent thumbs down to Saul Bellow, but most authors have elicited a wider range of reactions, and Maugham is one of those.

The Razor's Edge opens with an epigraph, a passage from the Katha-Upanishad:  "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over ; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard."  This immediately captured my attention, because it struck me as incongruous, a bit esoteric for an English novel of this period (pub date 1944). Moreover, the book doesn't have the typical structure of a novel -- it reads more like an extended series of journal entries, a pastiche of character sketches with the narrator, Maugham himself, relaying his conversations with them over a period of decades. Blessedly, Maugham has a brilliant eye for characters, and although his observations might fall into the category of highbrow gossip, they are enough to draw readers in and keep them curious.

First he introduces us to Elliott Templeton, an American who has wheedled his way into the uppermost reaches of European society in the early 1900s. Elliott's place in the best salons and dinner parties is his crowning achievement, the proof of his success after many years of ingratiating himself with the right people.

Believe me, my dear fellow, the average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily that he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.

When he travels to Chicago to visit family, Elliott invites Maugham to come along. Here he meets Isabel Bradley, Elliott's effervescent niece. She comments upon his "power of observation", the acuity of which will send her into tantrums later in the book.

"Uncle Elliott says he's often been surprised at your power of observation. He says nothing much escapes you, but that your great asset as a writer is your common sense."
"I can think of a quality that would be more valuable," I answered dryly. "Talent, for instance."

It is at this same dinner party that Maugham meets Larry Darrell, Isabel's fiance and the central character around whom the story revolves. Larry returned from WWI seemingly a bit shell-shocked, but now, a year later, he still seems disinclined to align himself with a profession. Adrift is the word, and Elliott insists that Isabel not marry the young man until he has settled down in a suitable line of work. Everyone adores Larry -- he is very congenial -- but they all agree that he's marching to an unconventional drummer. In a conversation with two of Larry's friends, Maugham gets confirmation of his own sense that Larry is on a spiritual quest, and even a life in the arts is unlikely to get him where he wants to go.

"A degree would be of no use to him. I have an inkling that he had a definite idea of what he wanted and felt he couldn't get it at a university. You know, in learning there's the lone wolf as well as the wolf who runs in the pack. I think Larry is one of those persons who can go no other way than their own."
"I remember once asking him if he wanted to write. He laughed and said he had nothing to write about."
"That's the most inconclusive reason for not writing that I've ever heard," I smiled.

Long before the Beats and the Beatles made their eastward pilgrimages, Larry journeys to India and is mesmerised by the holy men that he meets there. He follows one guru for some months and then, after an ecstatic vision during a mountain retreat, he thanks his teacher and returns to Europe. He tells Maugham, who listens politely, about this experience and about the yogi.

"And what had he got that particularly attracted you?" Larry looked at me for a full minute before answering. His eyes in their deep sockets seemed as though they were trying to pierce to the depths of my soul. "Saintliness." I was slightly disconcerted by his reply. In that room, with its fine furniture, with those lovely drawings on the walls, the word fell like a plop of water that has seeped through the ceiling from an overflowing bath.

Meanwhile, since Larry had not responded favourably to her ultimatum, Isabel married a mutual friend of theirs, Gray, a young and wealthy financier who adores her and can afford the lifestyle she craves. As Maugham runs into them here and there, in Europe and the US, when their fortune was intact and in tatters after the Crash, he realises that Isabel has never stopped loving Larry, impractical though it is.

Gray was driving and Larry was sitting beside him; Isabel and I were at the back. We were tired after the long day. Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt-cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldenly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I should never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such un-bridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick. She was unconscious of my presence; she was conscious of nothing but the hand, lying along the rim so negligently, that filled her with frantic desire. Then as it were a spasm twitched across her face, she gave a shudder and shutting her eyes sank into the comer of the car. "Give me a cigarette," she said in a voice I hardly recognized, it was so raucous. I got one out of my case and lit it for her. She smoked it greedily. For the rest of the drive she looked out of the window and never said a word.

Now Maugham's keenly observant eye is something that Isabel resents, and his bluntness in conversation aggravates her further. The writer asks her if she regrets her decision to marry Gray, and indeed, if she ever thinks of divorcing him.

"I've got no reason for divorcing him."
"That doesn't prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to."
She laughed. "Why d'you suppose they do it?"
"Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

Meanwhile, Elliott is aging and times are changing in Europe. The old aristocracy is slowly giving way to the nouveau riche. As with every other profession, the senior socialite must keep a chary eye on those who would supplant him.

Paul Barton was the young American whom Elliott had introduced into London society and who had aroused his hatred by dropping him when he no longer had any use for him. He had been somewhat in the public eye of late, first because he had adopted British nationality and then because he had married the daughter of a newspaper magnate who had been raised to the peerage. With this influence behind him and with his own adroitness it was evident that he would go far. Elliott was very bitter.
"Whenever I wake up in the night and hear a mouse scratching away in the wainscoat I say, 'That's Paul Barton climbing.'"

In one of the most insightful passages about Elliott's demise, Maugham describes a Princess who declines to invite Elliott to a party at her chateau on the Riviera. Maugham tries to console his friend by reassuring him that the hostess is not worth the heartbreak.

She was not a bad sort, generous and hospitable, and her only grave fault was her malicious tongue. She could not help saying beastly things about even her intimate friends, but she did this because she was a stupid woman and knew no other way to make herself interesting. Since her slanders were repeated she was often not on speaking terms with the objects of her venom, but she gave good parties and most of them found it convenient after a while to forgive her.

Elliott, however, sees this snub as the end of an era, the end of his era.

Elliott, sitting up in bed, rocked to and fro like a woman distraught. "Oh, it's so unkind," he said. "I hate them, I hate them all. They were glad enough to make a fuss of me when I could entertain them, but now I'm old and sick they have no use for me. Not ten people have called to inquire since I've been laid up, and all this week only one miserable bunch of flowers. I've done everything for them. They've eaten my food and drunk my wine. I've run their errands for them. I've made their parties for them. I've turned myself inside out to do them favours. And what have I got out of it? Nothing, nothing, nothing. There's not one of them who cares if I live or die. Oh, it's so cruel." He began to cry. Great heavy tears trickled down his withered cheeks. "I wish to God I'd never left America."

Ever the loyal friend, Maugham contrives to speak with Miss Keith, the Princess' dour Scottish secretary in an attempt to finagle an invitation for Elliott. Miss Keith, however, is no soft touch. She's been working for the wealthy for too long.

"You know what she is. She's got a down on him. She crossed his name out on the list herself."
"He's dying, you know. He'll never leave his bed again. He's awfully hurt at being left out."
"If he wanted to keep in with the Princess he'd have been wiser not to tell everyone that she goes to bed with her chauffeur. And him with a wife and three children."
"And does she?"
Miss Keith looked at me over her pince-nez. "I've been a secretary for twenty-one years, my dear sir, and I've made it a rule to believe all my employers as pure as the driven snow. I'll admit that when one of my ladies found herself three months gone in the family way when his lordship had been shooting lions in Africa for six, my faith was sorely tried, but she took a little trip to Paris, a very expensive little trip it was too, and all was well. Her ladyship and I shared a deep sigh of relief."

When Elliott at last leaves this vale of tears (without having attended the party in question), Maugham imagines what sort of heaven might await him. It would necessarily be exclusive.

I suspected that Elliott saw the celestial habitations in the guise of the chateaux of a Baron de Rothschild with eighteenth-century panelling on the walls, Buhl tables, marquetry cabinets and Louis Quinze suites covered with their original petit-point. "Believe me, my dear fellow," he went on after a pause, "there'll be none of this damned equality in heaven."

Maugham begins the final chapter of the novel on an odd note:

I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

And in this last chapter, Larry reveals his own journey, which, although peripatetic, feels like the most solidly grounded aspect of the whole story.  At one point, distraught as he tries to comprehend the evils he witnessed during the war, Larry speaks with a priest, Father Ensheim, who offers some advice.

"'Then you've been reading for four years? Where have you got?' " 'Nowhere,' I said. "He looked at me with an air of such radiant benignity that I was confused. I didn't know what I'd done to arouse so much feeling in him. He softly drummed his fingers on the table as though he were turning a notion over in his mind. " 'Our wise old Church,' he said then, 'has discovered that if you will act as if you believed belief will be granted to you; if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, your doubt will be dispelled; if you will surrender yourself to the beauty of that liturgy the power of which over the human spirit has been proved by the experience of the ages, peace will descend upon you.'"

Larry spent his life following the advice of a wide assortment of spiritual guides, both in person and in print, and in the end, by Maugham's estimation, did arrive in a state of relative grace. Wondering how to conclude the story, Maugham finally decided that it was a story of success for everyone involved:  Elliott achieved social success, Isabel also lived a life of comfortable security and social status, and Larry consistently developed his spiritual enlightenment. I couldn't help but feel that Larry's life was ultimately the one of greatest contentment, but I don't know if that's what Maugham intended to suggest, or my own preferences at work.

Not too long ago, I downloaded an ebook, The Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland.  I find it useful as a reference book rather than a volume to read cover to cover. Sutherland's chapter on Maugham rang especially true after reading The Razor's Edge. It made me realise that the author put much more of himself into the character of Elliott than into the character of Larry. And that wickedly keen sense of observation, impressive though it was, earned him some enemies.

The eye that looked on was cold and, in later life, was everywhere seen as reptilian: "The Lizard of Oz," Noel Coward called him.

Maugham once wrote that he was 1/4 homosexual and 3/4 heterosexual and only later admitted that he'd got the numbers backward. He married a wealthy divorcee, Syrie Wellcome, when she became pregnant, but it was a short and unhappy marriage. Thereafter he stayed with men, including his secretary, Alan Searle (whom Sutherland classifies as rough trade). These relationships may have been more authentic, but they scarcely seem happier, and his end sounds every bit as fraught and tragic as Elliott Templeton's.

He visited England regularly until the publication of a late-life memoir, Looking Back, in 1962. It was judged ungentlemanly in its attack on the recently dead Syrie, and led to his being ostracised by fellow members of the Garrick. It devastated him. Alone with Alan, he wept and wept -- the two of them returned to the Mauresque -- and Maugham never came to England again. Three years later he died, aged ninety, mad, raving and wretched.

Tickets for Armchair Travel

I recently came across a blog that I admire. It's Mary Whipple's Seeing the World Through Books.

She says, "In recent years I have reviewed books set in countries from Afghanistan to Zanzibar, representing 132 of the 195 countries in the world.  My objective is educational.  The vast majority of books I review are literary fiction written by authors from other countries or set in other countries.  Since so many western readers have not traveled to many of the countries featured here, and since references are often made to particular places well known to readers from those countries, I often use small photographs to clarify and explain the references within the novels." As of today, there are nearly 590 book reviews on Mary's site, and they cover nearly every country on the planet.

I've always loved books which afford me the luxury of armchair travel or which impel me to buy airline tickets to see distant places for myself.  I've also been long obsessed with maps. You know, maps -- those diagrams of what is where, drawn by people who know.  

Another web site, They Draw and Travel, has expanded my definition of a map. Bandung, a former hill-station during the Dutch colonial period on Java, Indonesia, now draws compulsive shoppers, having converted its glorious old colonial buildings into factory outlets, selling the wares of Indonesia's clothing manufacturing trade at negligible discounts. Sensible people might use this map to find the glorious natural waterfall (on the left) and enjoy its beauty while their companions shop til they drop along the thoroughfares to the east.

Other maps include special interests, like the taco tour of Puerto Vallarta, or an aspiring vampire's map of New Orleans. There's even a map of street musicians in Cork, but unless Irish buskers are people of long-standing habits, that map may have an expiry date.

This map, 'Trulli and Silence in Italy', caught my eye first because it is beautiful, and second because I rarely associate Italy with silence or the tranquillity that this map evokes.  Maybe I should go to Trulli to investigate for myself. 

Postscript:  Trulli does not refer to a place, but to the buildings found there. According to Unesco, trulli, "limestone dwellings found in the southern region of Puglia, are remarkable examples of drywall (mortarless) construction, a prehistoric building technique still in use in this region."  Here is a photo from Unesco's page, but frankly, I think the map above, by Federica di Carlo, is more captivating.

Pearl of China, by Anchee Min

After what felt like an endless list of Og Mandino books to be recorded for Malaysian Association for the Blind, I was very cheered to move on. Pearl of China's cover suggested to me a lightweight novel for young readers, but I quickly realised my error. It is in fact a historical novel about Pearl S. Buck, told from the Chinese perspective, and told well. After several months of recording with little enthusiasm, I began looking forward to the hours in the booth with this book.  It took me half a session just to record the final chapter, having to overwrite passages read with a quavering voice.  

Pearl Sydenstricker came as an infant with her Christian missionary parents to Chin-Kiang (today Zhenjiang). Her parents sent her back to the US to attend college, after which she returned to China, where she stayed until the Communist Revolution in 1934. She was, culturally and linguistically, Chinese. 

Anchee Min, a Chinese woman who migrated to the US when in her mid-20s, is especially well-equipped to address the lives, loves and challenges of a bi-cultural woman. In terms of the novel's accuracy, she confesses that the Chinese narrator, Willow Yee, is a composite character whom she created from the identities of several of Pearl's Chinese friends, and she shifted the dates of a couple of events to aid the story's flow. Otherwise, she claims to have stayed very close to the historical record.  

Pearl's father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a fiercely driven missionary who often disregarded the needs and wishes of his wife and daughters in his zeal to minister to the Chinese. Pearl returned to China after college with a new fiance in tow -- Lossing Buck -- and, to Willow's dismay, Lossing was the agricultural version of Absalom. He aimed to save the Chinese peasantry by introducing new, modern farming methods, and he expected Pearl to assist him in this mission, much as Absalom looked to his wife as a helpmeet. 

Their marriage, if Anchee Min is anywhere near the truth of the matter, was a predictable train wreck. Lossing admired Pearl's ability to speak several dialects, but he himself was tone-deaf so would never master any of them, making him entirely dependent upon her for interpretation and translation. He was no more at ease with the local customs: He couldn't abide the Chinese festivities at their wedding. He chased the children out from under the bed on wedding night, where they were hiding to promote fertility. Perhaps Lossing's most signal failure of assimilation was his rejection of Chinese culinary culture.

Lossing was disgusted when he saw all the chopsticks reaching for the same plate. He said he would rather starve... he didn't even notice what she cooked for him. Unlike the Chinese, who lived to eat, Lossing ate to live.

To Willow's further distress, Pearl followed her husband to China's poorest province, Anhui, because the Governor there felt he had nothing to lose by giving the foreign agriculturist's suggestions a go. Unfortunately, the farmers were less receptive.

"How is your agriculturalist?" I asked.

"Well, he is turning into a disillusionist," Pearl replied. "Lossing resents the attitudes of Chinese farmers. He feels less sympathy toward their misery because they are closed to his ideas. His efforts didn't succeed and the farmers quit his experiments." 

Pearl sympathised with the peasants who saw her husband as a foolish man."Lossing believes that if his method works in Iowa, it must work in Anhui."

Although Lossing's missionary vision was a failure (he and Pearl went their separate ways after a few years), Absalom's was not. Perhaps by his sheer force of character, determination and passionate faith, he converted first a few and then ever more Chinese to Christianity (or their synchretised version of it).  Carie, Pearl's mother, drew people to the worship of Christ by her gentle ways, music lessons, and first aid treatments.  The people of Chin-Kiang may have been in awe of Absalom's booming Old Testament patriarch's voice, but they saw Christ's words in action when they were with Carie. When the foreigners came under threat, first from the Nationalists following Chiang Kai-Shek and then from the Communists led by Mao, the people of Chin-Kiang defended their pastor's family. When Pearl and her sister Grace and their children finally fled Maoist persecutions in 1934, Pearl probably hoped to return to China in the near future. Absalom stayed behind with his church while his daughters sailed for America.  

For the rest of the novel, Willow and Pearl stay in touch by letters, for which Willow suffers persecution and imprisonment. Pearl is now rejected as a foreign cultural imperialist by Mao and his wife, who is spearheading the Cultural Revolution. Pearl Buck's application for a visa to return to China with President Nixon at the time of his landmark visit in the 1970s was denied. This, Anchee Min believes, was the handiwork of the vengeful Madame Mao. Pearl died a few years later, and in the very moving denouement, Willow brings some soil from Carie's grave in Chin-Kiang to scatter on Pearl's grave in Pennsylvania, marvelling at the Chinese landscaping and greenhouse full of camellias surrounding her best friend's American home.  By taking some soil from Pearl's grave back to China, she will have successfully reunited their souls.

In the Author's Note, Anchee Min says that although Pearl Buck's story has been written many times, it's always been from the western perspective. She wanted to write about Pearl and  the impact of her work from a Chinese point of view. Although many Chinese during those years following the Boxer Rebellion blamed foreigners for many of the evils that befell them (and often rightfully so), this is a very refreshing portrayal of a family of foreigners who earned the abiding respect and love of the people with whom they lived. 

Her name is very familiar to me, but I've not yet read any of Pearl S. Buck's novels.  The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. It's high time I read some of her work, and I thank Anchee Min for this historical novel to give me the nudge that I needed.

Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Laura Willowes is a spinster in post-WWI England, men being in especially short supply after the war. She's been shuttled dutifully from her late father's home to that of her brother and his family, where she becomes the quiet but helpful Aunt Lolly. As she reaches middle age, her family members forbear her mild eccentricities until the evening she announces that she is moving out. She intends to go live in a cottage in Great Mop, a village in the Chilterns, and perhaps even keep a donkey. Her sister-in-law (who believes that rain and falling leaves result in ill health unless one is safely in London) frets about the foul weather in the country. Her brother says, "It is not sensible. Or suitable."  For the first time in her 47 years, however, Laura Willowes takes charge of her life and sets out for Great Mop, population 227.  (She acquired this detail from the map and guide book she was mysteriously compelled to buy in a London shop, divining from it that Great Mop was where she must go.)

And so Lolly lets a cottage from Mrs. Leak. She takes long rambles over the hills and on the country paths. She collects herbs, listens to the wind and trees and falls down and weeps for joy in a field bursting with cowslip blossoms.

The weight of all her unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her bosom down to the earth; she trembled, understanding for the first time how miserable she had been; and in another moment she was released.

She revels in her sudden freedom to simply be -- she no longer needs to be of service to others to justify her existence. Her bliss is interrupted when her nephew, Titus, comes to Great Mop for a visit and decides to stay. Laura's exhilaration is shattered.

She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again... And she was the same old Aunt Lolly, so useful and obliging and negligible. They were come out to recapture her, they had tracked her down and closed her in... they were all leagued against her. They were come out to seize on her soul.  

On a disconsolate walk through the woods, she cries out for help, for someone or something to alleviate her distress. When she comes home, she finds a small kitten in the cottage. How had it got in? The doors and windows were all closed. She realises, just as certainly as she'd known she must come to Great Mop, that the cat is her familiar, and she is a witch.  Her plea for help had been heard.

She is quite calm in her new role. Perhaps some newly discovered powers result in Titus leaving Great Mop, or maybe that was a coincidence. She doesn't want to wreak chaos or cast wicked spells -- she just wants to be left in peace.

When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded.... There they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, and all the time being thrust down into dullness. I tell you, that sort of thing settles down on one, like a fine dust, and by and by the dust is age, settling down... If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn't matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed.  

And there you have it, the ageless definition of a witch: an old, unmarried (spinster or widow, it makes no difference) woman who would like to live a tranquil, independent and self-reliant life, allowing her intuition to synchronise with the natural environment around her.  In other words, a life neither sensible nor suitable.

Although I've made my own retreat to Kuala Lumpur, where I can live life pretty much as I choose (to the extent that the two cats, my own familiars, permit it), Lolly Willowes made me ache for the countryside -- hedges and coppices, rolling hills and seasonal flowers. I need to get out of the city more often.

My only grumble about this book was the copy I bought second-hand from an online seller who described it as being in "like new" condition. The cover was unscathed, but the young woman who last owned it annotated madly, underlining what seemed to be random passages and commenting with distressing frequency and large, juvenile letters, "YUCK" or "Hahahahaha" or "funny how all the houses have names." That's what they do in England, dear. She drew boxes around all the unfamiliar words, and since her vocabulary seems slightly less than that of a working border collie, the pages look like erratically tiled floors. I don't mind buying used books with annotations here and there, but these were an annoying distraction. I have no idea who the previous owner was, but a pox on her anyway.

Beginner's Grace, by Kate Braestrup

Kate Braestrup

Kate Braestrup's first book, Here If You Need Me, her account of her work as the chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, is the one book I have given as a gift more than any other. Whether or not you have any connection -- to Maine, game wardens, Unitarian-Universalist ministers, or God (in whatever form) -- I defy you to read this book and remain unmoved.

When I searched an on-line book site for yet another gift copy of Here If You Need Me, I spotted Kate's newest book, Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life.  I confess, if anyone else had written a book with this title, I'd have clicked past it in a heartbeat, but given its author, I just as rapidly clicked it into my electronic shopping basket.  And she's done it again:  I would (and most probably will) give copies of this book to friends of all faiths and no faith whatever. In the latter case, I'll include a note directing them to Chapter 16: Prayers for Agnostics and Atheists.

Maine is a harsh place. Severe climate, vast expanses of wild space both on land (17 million acres of forest, give or take) and sea, and dire poverty in much of the state add up to a challenging terrain for a law enforcement chaplain. Yes, the Warden Service oversees fishing and hunting permits, but these are also the officers who get called in when people go missing in the woods or in the water, which they do regularly. It's Kate's job to provide spiritual comfort to the wardens, the survivors, and whoever has volunteered to step in and help in any given crisis. If this sounds like a tall order, it is. Staggering, in my view. Yet for all her remarkable qualities, the Dr. Reverend Kate Braestrup is pragmatic.

I accompany game wardens to accidents and drownings and search-and-rescue operations in the Maine woods. Regardless of the circumstances, community ministry brings us into close contact with people whose socioeconomic and religious backgrounds vary widely, and who may share with us little more than birth, illness and death -- the common features of human experience. Whatever theological or doctrinal systems a chaplain begins his ministry with, the work itself has a distinctly streamlining effect. A chaplain doesn't have a leisurely hour in which to explain God. The suffering is right there, and its urgency demands an immediate response. We don't give a lot of sermons out in the field or in the woods or streets. Instead we are called upon to offer the spiritual equivalent of triage. We're asked to pray.  

We certainly feel inclined to pray in moments of crisis and trauma, but she reminds us that in calmer moments, most of us will pray in some form or another to express a train of three thoughts:  "Yes. Wow! And thanks."

I won't claim that prayer can get you a new car or find the lover of your dreams. It won't help you gain status, assert your dominance, or otherwise please your ego. It won't even make life easier.
What it can do -- what prayer, at its best and at our best , has always done -- is help us to live consciously, honourably, and compassionately. Because I am not stronger, more self-sufficient, smarter, braver, or any less mortal than my forebears or my neighbours, I need this help. As long as prayers help me to be more loving, then I need prayer. As long as prayer serves as a potent means of sharing my love with others, I need prayer. 

Chapter 6 is 'Pausing on the Threshold for Prayer'.  In 1996, Kate's husband, a Maine State Trooper, set out from their house in Thomaston, just a few miles from where I grew up. His cruiser hit black ice on the bridge over the Georges River, and he died in the resulting collision. The author of this book knows what it means to see a loved go out the door on a normal day and never return. Will a prayer at the threshold prevent such tragedies? Of course not. But it will make everyone pause for just a moment and express love and appreciation for each other. One of her closest friends during Kate's teenage years was a Catholic, and she recalls waiting (impatiently -- 'the movie starts in 15 minutes!') while Natasha's father delivered his blessing, the same blessing he delivered every time a member of his family left the house.

"May the Lord bless you and keep you,
May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you,
May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you
And give you peace."

As it was, dancing impatiently on the linoleum in the Belfiores' kitchen, my hand on the knob of their back door, I watched Natasha roll her eyes and submit to this exotic ritual: a father's blessing. I was envious. 

As Kate reminds us, "goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with you".  She is not particular about the wording you choose for such blessings -- she's rather fond of George Lucas' prayer, "May the Force be with you."  At their core, these prayers are all ways of telling someone, You matter. And I wish you well.  We often think these things, but we too rarely say them.

She advocates modifying or composing prayers as we need to. There are many childhood traumas which leave us viscerally averse to certain words and images, particularly if we've grown up in severe religious environments.  Maybe we are just desperate to get away from the image of God as the white senior citizen lounging upon a cloud. Kate is adamant that any prayer which "gives us the willies" needs to be changed. Because the bride cringed visibly whenever the Lord's Prayer was read aloud but acknowledged that her Catholic groom's family would expect to hear it at their wedding, Reverend Braestrup came up with the idea to read the prayer in the original Koine Greek, the language in which it was first recorded.

The bride's folks were charmed to hear the words as Jesus might have said them; the groom's mother felicitously recalled some Greek ancestors; and though "Our Father who art in heaven" made the bride tense and miserable, Pater h'emon, h'o en tois ouranois went down a treat.

On Mothers' Day, she led a church service as they prayed "Our Mother who art in heaven..." mostly because it expanded her experience of the prayer and reminded everyone that God has no gender.  I also like her adaptation of the 23rd psalm:  "You are my shepherd, I shall not want, for you make me to lie down in green pastures..." Who is 'you'?  In my case, I can say only that it's an ineffable, unknowable force which is far greater than I.

Many of us are squeamish about ideas and images of the divine.  Maybe we have a vague sense of some overarching power. As someone who often faces loss, death and tragedy, Kate Braestrup has more cause than most of us to visit the topic of theodicy -- why do bad things happen to good people? What kind of a deity would stand by and watch my loved one be murdered? You talk about mercy, and compassion and love, but where was God when my child fell through the ice?

Her answer: In any disaster, look for the helpers. Look for God in the ones who are coming out to do whatever they can to help. Tragedy happens. It always has and always will, and no amount of prayer will prevent it.  The sacred manifests itself in love. If you choke at saying "God" in prayer, for whatever reason, try substituting "love".

I believe absolutely, implacably, irretrievably and indefatigably that nothing matters more than love. I believe all human souls are called to become as loving as they possibly can be, given the limitations that time and luck will inevitably impose. Love is the point, the purpose, and the ultimate value; it is consciousness and empathy, alpha and omega, beginning and end. God is love. 

She talks about physicality in prayer. She cites the ritual prostrations of Muslims, Buddhists and Sikhs. She talks about people who pray as they run. She mentions the story of Christ washing the apostles' feet at the Last Supper, and she talks about the simple, comforting gesture of laying a hand on the shoulder of someone who is suffering. We have bodies, and they too can be instruments of prayer.

You can just allow your body to arrange itself in surrender and allow yourself to yield before all that is vast, incomprehensible, and stronger by far than your own soft self.  

Lest her readers bend down to praise her as a saint, Reverend Kate freely shares stories to illustrate her very human proclivities. When her dentist confides that her ex-boyfriend is coming in to have a tooth filled, she encourages him to be stingy with the novocaine. When a colleague asks her to lead a prayer service at the Maine State Prison, she objects that it's full of convicts, and she is the widow of a State Trooper and a law enforcement chaplain -- "I don't do criminals".  But she does manage to choke out a vague prayer for the ex, and she pulls off the prison visit rather nobly.  And she speaks also of the times when it is appropriate to refrain from any words whatever, when just silently holding a hand is the best prayer for the occasion.

And for those of us who remain uncertain about what or whom we're praying to, here we find one gorgeous image:  we are crossing, very humbly and gently, a velvet bridge. We may not know precisely what's on the other side, but the crossing is the important part.

In a poem entitled 'On Prayer', Czeslaw Milosz answers an imaginary atheist with love, "You ask me how to pray to someone who is not," he writes. "All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge."
To set foot on that bridge requires not certainly but deep humility. If the other end of the bridge turns out to rest on nothing, well then, walking the bridge together in love shall be a fine and sufficient gift.

Postscript:  This is from Kate Braestrup's blog. If I failed to get the point across that this she a laugh-out-loud funny woman with a tremendous heart, read this.

It is fundraiser for The Community School, a place for kids who, for whatever reason, don’t or can’t manage at the regular local high school (kids like me, come to think of it!). It’s a good cause, for which eight local worthies (fire chief, police officer, restauranteur, et al.) are paired with real dancers. They are teaching us how to dance -- more or less -- and will perform with us so that, presumably, we don’t look completely ridiculous. When asked what sort of dance I would like to perform, my mind went completely blank. “Salsa?” the instructor suggested, and I said sure, why not? Here’s why not: The Salsa is a very sexy dance. And I am NOT a sexy person. (I’m a minister, for Christ’s sake!) So I did what I usually do in such circumstances: I complained. Christian Clayton, dance instructor at Swing-n-Sway dance studio in Rockland, had to listen to me whine as he commenced the mighty labor of creating a latin swan out of a teutonic, middle aged goose. Every week, I clomped grimly through my routine, an expression of acute disapproval on my face while Christian made encouraging noises in the sort of voice nurses use with the senile. From what I could see in Swing-n-Sway’s enormous, merciless mirror, the audience was in for a disappointing experience. (Fortunately, it will be brief: The whole dance only lasts a minute and thirteen seconds, and yes, I counted.) The spangled costume is not going to help. Then, during an Easter lunch at which I was enlivening everyone’s holiday repast by complaining, my friend Lucinda said, with her usual perfect calm and dry accuracy: “Well, luckily, this isn’t about you.” Ah! Right! It isn’t about me! Thank God! It’s about… love and service—and I can do love and service, even if I can’t do the salsa.