So with sex, I have to please two women, one of whom is English and dead?
an adolescent boy, deaf and dumb (but, as is shown later in the book, extraordinarily attractive to homosexuals)
Is he good at pinball?
Years and years ago, in the extreme ignorance of my callow youth (before I knew anything about WWI, shell shock, Freudian psychoanalysis, or anything at all, really), I happened to pick up a copy of West's The Return of the Soldier, which I then proceeded to read. I don't remember much of the plot and detail of that novel (except that I liked Margaret, the working-class female character), but I do still recall my reaction to the book: I found it difficult, sometimes downright confusing, but also eye-opening, and a new experience for me (because I didn't know anything about anything). I was shocked by its depiction of the English class system.
I think I'd like to reread that novel, along with some other stuff by Rebecca West.
I have "The New Meaning of Treason." I read it years ago and recall it as being good. I don't remember what the argument was. Something about Lord Haw Haw.
Rebecca West was goddamn amazing. She grew up middle class but poor in Edwardian England -- her father abandoned the family when she was ten or so -- and wrote her way out of poverty and, eventually, to wealth and a country estate. She was brilliant and sharp-tongued and fearless; since this was Edwardian England, she was also often kind of insane.
She was a feminist and a suffragette and later an anti-fascist, which becomes even more interesting when you realize she was an instinctive elitist with a broad conservative streak -- she had a progressive brain on top of a Tory brainstem.
She became H.G. Wells' lover in 1913 -- he was 40ish, she was half his age -- and bore his child (who grew up to be a competent but very bitter writer in his own right). Many years later, she attended the Nuremberg Trials and wrote a series of excellent essays about them; meanwhile, she was sleeping with one of the American judges, Francis Biddle.
She lived to be 87 and was interesting and difficult right up to the end.
Also, she was born Cecily Fairfield, and took her pen name from an Ibsen heroine. Not to vtsoobc, but someone here was reading her monumental book about Jugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, with huge delight last year.
Anyway, the other stuff in that article is well worth reading.
she was sleeping with one of the American judges, Francis Biddle
He should have been classier about it and not spread it around so much.
she asks why it is that women, unshackled from Edwardian patriarchy, still find love and sex so disappointing.
Does she? I read it as asking why women in novels by female authors still find love and sex so disappointing.
I think that's just you -- I don't think she raised the possibility that everything's just fine except that women who write novels complain a lot. Neglectful of her.
There are whole grocery store shelves full of novels by female authors where love and sex are not disappointing. Look for the shirtless dude on the the cover.
If the shirt doesn't fit, she must be getting it.
They often have time-traveling Viking/Navy SEALS in them. At least the good ones do.
On topic because everybody here looks pre-Edwardian.
9: really? She starts off talking about how the sexes don't understand each other.
Mutual understanding has never been the strong point of the sexes--an opinion it would be advisable to check by reference to the work of women imaginative writers.
And then she cites lots of examples to prove it of novels by women in which male characters behave in completely inexplicable ways to female characters...
not only did [a Margaret Drabble character] say that that was what he wanted, it is impossible to imagine a sane man not wanting it; but there he is, running away, as if what he was escaping was eternal misery
and then finishes up quoting Iris Murdoch about how she really can't picture a good male character.
It is, after all, an article about novels in a literary review.
Wasn't there a movie about how Iris Murdoch had such a great relationship with Professor Slughorn?
Anyway, I took it as her using the novels as evidence for the general concept that men suck at heterosexuality.
14: Really. The first sentence you quote, she's looking at women imaginative writers to check her impression of reality, and treating their work as good evidence of the nature of facts in the real world. The possibility that they're just wrong, and the real world is completely other than how they describe it, is yours, not hers.
I mean, it's a real possibility -- it's important that whenever anyone says something, you should immediately speculate as to whether they're just making it up.
I'm just going to assume women want a man who looks like Jim Broadbent. It's an achievable goal.
Well, I didn't think she was making it up - I thought she was doing literary criticism and writing about how women don't understand men (and presumably vice versa), witness all these novels by women where the male characters they have invented behave completely illogically.
But she was actually saying that women (not just women novelists but all women) don't understand men because men just really are fundamentally inexplicable, witness all these novels by women in which male characters behave completely illogically, just like men do in real life.
I had to google Jim Broadbent. I suppose you could assume that.
it's important that whenever anyone says something, you should immediately speculate as to whether they're just making it up.
Well, yes, it is. It's an important skill for surviving in the modern world and not electing lunatic con-men to high office.
Looking like Jim Broadbent is definitely an achievable goal, Moby. Si evidentiam requiris, circumspice, though only if Jim Broadbent is right behind you.
Myself, I try and keep my active skepticism at least somewhat contained on the basis of prior knowledge. Not trusting anything at all gets terribly time-consuming.
Well, OK, then, but again: I didn't think she was making anything up! I
He stopped to meditate upon optical illusions; or perhaps the mutability, but persistent extension, of a piece of wax.
No, no. I didn't think you were doubting West at all. I understood you (in comment 8) to be saying that she was being reasonably skeptical about the perceptions of women writers generally, or at least the ones she was discussing -- not 'why do these problems exist' but 'why do these authors believe these problems exist.'
I think you were mistaken about that, and attributing a skepticism to her that wasn't present in the piece.
No, men really are impossible, but that's isn't the point. Everyone knows that. West is mocking these young women for having hopes that things could be different.
not 'why do these problems exist' but 'why do these authors believe these problems exist.'
Not even that: I thought she was saying "this problem exists, look, here are some authors suffering from it" - given that the problem in question is "women find men incomprehensible", and that she accuses Iris Murdoch of lacking "the ultimate virtue of the novelist", because Murdoch writes that goodness (in men) is "rare and hard to picture".
If men actually are all terrible and incomprehensible, why is it such a bad thing that Iris Murdoch says she can't picture a good man? A good novelist, West seems to be saying, would be able to imagine (and presumably write about) good men. Iris Murdoch says she can't; this makes West question Murdoch's abilities as a novelist.
If you can't picture something that doesn't exist, you can't be a novelist who writes science fiction. West was noted for liking a least one novelist who wrote science fiction.
Well, all novelists write about things that don't exist. Jane Eyre didn't exist.
But women who do whatever it is Jane Eyre did existed. Unless Jane Eyre was part of a martian invasion of earth. I never actually read the book.
Well, all novelists write about things that don't exist.
AT LEAST AJAY GETS ME...
I still think you're mistaken to think that West is ultimately questioning Murdoch's abilities as a novelist in this regard. Her conclusion isn't that Murdoch has been put wrong by her own incapacity, but by the 'timescales of the universe,' which have a ways to evolve yet before the kinds of harmonious relationships between the sexes the writers she's discussing don't depict will become possible.
Until then, drunken hook-ups and resentment for all.
36: so what's this "ultimate virtue of the novelist" thing that Murdoch apparently doesn't have, then?
It turns out that the first Mrs Rochester is an alien. Jane eventually has to nuke Thornfield Hall from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I really need to read that book sometime.
That West 'doubt's if she has. After the block quote, West seems to me to come down clearly on the side that Murdoch is describing something about the world as it is:
It is the timescales of the universe which put us all wrong. A baby takes nine months to bring to birth, and a woman can have a baby a year; yet it will take centuries before the sexual life of a woman, which produced these babies with such speed, becomes guaranteed against the humiliation and insecurity described by contemporary women novelists. But we were never promised otherwise.
Murdoch's not in the wrong through failure of skill as a novelist, but because the timescales of the universe have put her wrong.
and a woman can have a baby a year
That's not recommended, is it? My mom had four in five years, ten months. That really seems like about as far as you'd want to push it.
She seemed exhausted from as early as I can remember until some time in the late 80s.
Ah, I get you (I think). She's saying: "Murdoch says she can't picture a good man and she doesn't think there are many, or really any, around. At first this makes you think Murdoch is a shit novelist, but then, when you think about it, she's right: there aren't, or not yet anyway and probably not for ages yet."
Any literal Irish twins (same calendar year birthday) in there?
My mom had four in five years, ten months.
Five years, 7 months.
44: Yeah, I think that's about it.
Hilariously the link in 13 is blocked here.
If I'm going to look like Jim Broadbent, I need to go get a big lunch.
The evidence against Ajay's theory comes at the beginning and end of the piece. At the beginning, she writes:
We have an elegant sufficiency of women novelists, and they give us a great deal of evidence which will enable us to make up our minds whether the feminist pioneers have been disappointed in their hope that, if women were admitted to the universities and the professions and commerce and industry, and exercised the vote and were eligible for both Houses of Parliament, they would not only be able to earn their own livings and develop their minds and live candidly, but might also be luckier in love than their mothers and grandmothers, and would take it better if they were unlucky. But this evidence is not forthcoming.
A baby takes nine months to bring to birth, and a woman can have a baby a year; yet it will take centuries before the sexual life of a woman, which produced these babies with such speed, becomes guaranteed against the humiliation and insecurity described by contemporary women novelists. But we were never promised otherwise.The humiliation, the insecurity, and even the promise that they will be overcome, are clearly things which "the early feminist pioneers" were concerned with, not just the novelists herein discussed.
In mitigation, Rebecca West is a woman, I'm a man, and I'm sure I read something somewhere about how mutual understanding has never been the strong point of the sexes.
42: Queen Victoria had nine in 17 years, including four between November 1840 and August 1844 (three years and nine months).
Just think what Heebiemom might have achieved with a virile Aryan husband like Albert.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
But just think how many more Heebieselfs there could have been! Enough to flip Texas, forsooth!
45
Any literal Irish twins (same calendar year birthday) in there?
The funny thing is that, however interesting the use West is making of it might be, the Murdoch passage she quotes in the tls article isn't about the difficulty of imagining good men (as opposed to good women) but the difficulty of concretely imagining good human beings of any sort ("if we consider contemporary candidates for goodness, if we know of any, we are likely to find them obscure, or else on closer inspection full of frailty. Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture."). It isn't surprising that Murdoch would think this way, because she was a Platonist - cases of goodness in this world are at best going to be very deficient imitations of The Good. And this goes together with a general human tendency to be dissatisfied and perversely fuck it up when you might think you're on a good thing (original sin, Freud). I doubt she'd agree that any number of centuries is going to help clear that up.
To be fair to West, there's only one gender that you can picture using "Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture" as the subject line for an unsolicited, texted picture of their genitals.
If you agreed with Murdoch, you wouldn't have to deny that males are disproportionately awful in many ways that can be improved, but you'd probably take the specific tendency to do a runner on a relationship when things are looking particularly good to be a more generally human thing (even if males are statistically over-represented even there).
64: True - though I can imagine Mae West texting a racy picture with the subject-line "Goodness had nothing to do with it".
Anyway, Weiner's go-to subject-line (during his bout of intermittent erectile dysfunction) was actually "Hardness appears to be both rare and good to picture".
Or "A hard man is good to find, unless you're still a high school student so please don't tell anybody."
If we had to have a dead West on the blog I think Mae is higher up the list than Rebecca, if only for her superior punning abilities.
I find this the most interesting part of the essay: "He does not want to live happily ever after. Yet not only did he say that that was what he wanted, it is impossible to imagine a sane man not wanting it..."
Indeed, "Mutual understanding has never been the strong point of the sexes."
I hope she was smart enough to realize that Cinderella's and Prince Charming's ideas of "happily ever after" might not be exactly congruent.
I bet he was out sniffing feet the night after he got back from the honeymoon.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an amazing book. I wonder if I still have my copy that's full of underlining and marginalia, or whether I left it in Budapest (or possibly Washington).
55. And when her obstetrician told her it wouldn't be safe for her to have any more, she replied, "Oh Doctor, does that mean we can have no more fun in bed?" I hope the doctor had a quiet word with Albert.
"Do you have 'Prince Albert' in a can?"