I have realized I haven’t posted an update on the books I am reading for a while, so here it is.
Night train to Odesa is proceeding. Slowly, because it’s not really the kind of book you go back to enthusiastically: Jen Stout did a great job, but it’s tough, sometimes. It is also moving, like when you stumble into pages on how soldiers and volunteers carve some pleasant moments to themselves with music.
I have finished Alternate endings. A short story anthology of historical what ifs, which was nice, on average.
Unsurprisingly , my favourites were the two stories on Medieval England: A Race Against Time, by Cathie Dunn, and Long Live the King, by Sharon Bennett Connolly. The former imagines that Robert of Gloucester manages to have Henry II crowned as a toddler, while the latter allows King John to survive his illness and understand some of the errors of his ways. It was also very interesting for me to read about a lady I had never heard of, Nicholaa de la Haye, who held Lincoln against French invaders and rebel lords for months. I tended to imagine all Norman ladies as confined to embroidery and child bearing.
The two stories about the Tudors are also enjoyable: Karen Heenan’s Princess of Spain (Catherine of Aragon marries Arthur, who succeeds Henry VII) and Samantha Wilcoxon’s Tudors with a Twist, about Mary Tudor’s marriage to Reginald Pole. In this alternative version of the first Tudor queen. Mary is a happier woman, and less bloody, less fanatical ruler.
In terms of historical what ifs, Princess of Spain is the one with the most interesting I believe: how would religion work out in England, hadn’t Henry caused a schism? In all likelihood, Protestantism would have prevailed anyway, but maybe in some very different way.
Finally, I enjoyed Remeber the Ladies, by Michael Ross, in which American women (and all white men) acquire the right to vote thanks to Abigail Adams, Martha Washington and other strong-minded women. I learnt that for a brief spell. in New Jersey, everyone who was not a slave – whether man or woman, white or black – had the right to vote, until the United States gave themselves a constitution.
Vercingetorix’s virgin , by Virginia Crow, is alright (both the Gallic chieftain and Caesar survive, and they manage to make peace), and so is Act worthy of yourselves, by Salina Baker, in which the ultimate hero of American independence, Joseph Warren, survives Bunker hill and has to negotiate his two missions, as a doctor and as a politician. Elizabeth K. Corbet’s Marie Therese remembers, instead, was frankly boring. I mean, take away the Guillottine and what remains of the Bourbons? Lace. Without even the arsenic to make it thrilling.
I am making slow progress with The Deor Hord: an Old English bestiary, by Hana Videen, but I am happy with it so far – I have read about one third. The latest chapter was about deer: roes, hinds, heorots (I had no idea Heorot, Hrothgar’s hall, meant deer), and have just started the one on the phoenix. The way in which Christian myths and Northern ones blend in the manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon era is fascinating.
At the moment, the only fiction is in the audiobooks I listen to: After the five Vani Sarca noirs (see my previous post), yesterday I went back to Tristram Shandy, but to day I have just started Gli ospiti paganti (The paying guests), by Sarah waters. It is a pity the Italian Audible only has it in translation, but it sound nice. Not as fascinating as The Little Stranger, though, at least for now.
I have at long last picked up Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters. Sad as many of them are, they are magnificent, and unpredictable.
Like Epiphany:
London. The grimy lilac softness
Of an April evening. Me
Walking over Chalk Farm Bridge
On my way to the tube station.
A new father – slightly light-headed
With the lack of sleep and the novelty.
Next, this young fellow coming towards me.
I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him
Because I noticed (I couldn’t believe it)
What I’d been ignoring.
Not the bulge of a small animal
Buttoned into the top of his jacket
The way colliers used to wear their whippets –
But its actual face. Eyes reaching out
Trying to catch my eyes – so familiar!
The huge ears, the pinched, urchin expression –
The wild confronting stare, pushed through fear,
Between the jacket lapels.
’It’s a fox-cub!’
I heard my own surprise as I stopped.
He stopped. ‘Where did you get it? What
Are you going to do with it?’
A fox-cub
On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!
‘You can have him for a pound.’ ‘But
Where did you find it? What will you do with it?’
‘Oh, somebody’ll buy him. Cheap enough
At a pound.’ And a grin.
What I was thinking
Was – what would you think? How would we fit it
Into our crate of space? With the baby?
What would you make of its old smell
And its mannerless energy?
And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
The long-mouthed, flashing temperament?
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?
The little fox peered past me at other folks,
At this one and at that one, then at me.
Good luck was all it needed.
Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life’s happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
My thoughts felt like big, ignorant hounds
Circling and sniffing around him.
Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back
Into the future
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox –
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
The extraordinary in the everyday. The wilderness in the urban context. And Hughes’s memories of a defiant little creature, of all the thoughts that whirled in his mind in the short conversation, with the fox cub becoming a kind of objective correlative for the poet’s doomed marriage. Me being me, with my hyperactive mirror neurons, the first time I read it I kept worrying about the cub. I hope it had a good life.
This morning Sarah Perry’s Melmoth arrived. Second hand. Let’s see how long I can wait until I start it.
And this is it.
I Don’t own the right to the pictures or the poem (But I have the the poem in print, I swear, in Ted Hughes’s Collected poems). I don’t choose the ads, WordPress does.
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