On De Beauvoir

It is my firm belief that in so far as possible extravagant birth commemorations as well as the hagiography of famous authors must not besmirch these pages.  Nevertheless a short blog post on The Beaver who was born this day in 1908.

In a post not long back, I alluded to the influence of De Beauvoir and co. on my life.  I don’t know if I am the ardent feminist I was in my youth for time has the habit of eroding the idea that the world will be as you imagine it to be.  Still The Second Sex is the closest a book will ever get to being a Bible for me.  It is apparently ill served in translation, and the reviews of the new translation appear to be mixed.  If a few of its subtleties are lost in the English version, it still remains a cool, detached study of the feminine condition.  In fact I would hardly call it a “women’s book” for it is far more ambitious in scope. De Beauvoir’s other books and novels stand on their own and she was also politically active, nevertheless The Second Sex remains what she is best known for. 

The Second Sex is of course a bit dated given it was written in 1949. There is for example a lot of emphasis on Freud, which doesn’t always ring true to the modern mind.   Even this is important though for what distinguishes it from many other feminist books is that it no polemic but a reasoned study as it’s very introduction shows:

For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women: and it is not new.  Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it.  It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really?……..What has become of women? was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine. But first we must ask: what is a woman?

A question that is possibly still being asked for even if the lives of women have changed since 1949, the ways in which the world works to ensure compliance to a feminine ideal remains fairly unchanged.

De Beauvoir is of course also known for the company she kept, most notably Sartre.  Though it was the most important of De Beauvoir’s relationships, she was perhaps a bit ill-served by it for Sartre arguably remains better known.  There is also a mini-industry on the sordid aspects of their life together which appears to have been far more complicated than anything the Bloomsbury set thought of.  Then there is De Beauvoir’s relationship with Nelson Algren, which hews far more to the romantic template resulting in a book on their letters and a play.  Coincidence or otherwise, the affair seems to have taken place around the time The Second Sex was published.  Truth be told Sartre is far too much the intellectual and there is a lack of the kind of passion found in De Beauvoir's correspondence to her other lovers. And there is admittedly something enticing in the juxtaposition of De Beauvoir the female intellectual and Algren the decidedly earthier author. 

How enticing can be seen from the rumours of a film on their affair starring Depp and Paradis.  If true, one can only borrow from the young and say “facepalm ”.  

R.I.P.

It has been a month in which a fair few writerly olds - as Gawker might put it - have departed. Happily after they have lived long.

JD Salinger wrote a book which everyone carried out around when young to indicate that they totally identified with adolescent angst. The other books were unreadable so no one read Salinger once they left academics.

Erich Segal wrote a silly novel called Love Story and and no one had to use the sorry word again., except pollies of various stripes.  He also wrote a book called The Class, the over many years kind of book Americans like to write. The most fascinating part for me was all that bit on Greek Classics (Segal taught Greek & Latin Lit.).

Louis Auchincloss wrote about the upper crust and in an old fashioned way. That is enough for an author to lose street cred these days though I don't mind a bit of old fashioned now and then. Should I test the Auchincloss waters? I am still undecided.

I have never read Howard Zinn. But judging by the eulogies, I should definitely dip more than a toe into A People's History.

Eileen Chang

A few years ago ago I saw a movie called Red Dust which was loosely based on Eileen Chang’s life. It was my first introduction to Chang, who by all accounts remains wildly popular in China. Of Chang’s fiction itself, translations are few and far between though Chang herself was proficient in English. In fact it was not until Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution came along that her short stories were readily available in a foreign language. Now there is not one collection but two, Lust Caution which kicks off with the short story that inspired Lee’s film and Love in a Fallen City which collects some of her better known stories. Of the two, Love in a Fallen City is superior though most of Chang’s highly compressed, perfectly composed work is accessible and readable. Many of Chang’s stories focus on the relationships between men and women in a Shanghai and Hong Kong on the cusp of war. Love in a Fallen City, for example, is an account of a love affair whose “will they, won’t they” is suddenly decided by the bombardment of Hong Kong by the Japanese. But the love itself, like in all of Chang’s stories, is troubled and complex, a series of half-gestures, withdrawals and second guessing. Few Chang stories and few families in her fiction are happy though I hesitate to call Chang a cruel writer. Her writing style is cool and excavating, often she allows one to see the mixture of good intention, false assumptions and self-interest that direct the course of human affairs. Additionally, some stories are shot through with Chang’s unhappy childhood and her real life involvement with a Chinese man working for the Japanese occupation and the subsequent rupture of the relationship. This is certainly true of Lust Caution, where youthful patriotism is undone by a girl’s fall into a sado-masochistic relationship (far more indirect and shorter than Lee's explicit and indulgent film). Additionally, Chang’s own sophistication and English influences makes her cast a particularly interesting light on a China in flux. Many of her Eurasian or “mixed-blood” characters are seen as “forward” and are not fully accepted by conventional Chinese society. Chinese society itself is in transition, shedding a feudal past yet still to embrace its modernity. As an example "Red Rose, White Rose" deals with a man from China’s burgeoning middle class who is attracted to the Red Rose of the title but cannot deal with her modern flirtatious ways or even comprehend that she is an ideal match for him. Instead he marries the girl who is purely Chinese and a White Rose i.e. the idealised chaste wife (the admiration men feel for this ideal recurs in a few stories). Further, Chang’s protagonist, Zhenbao, is from a family which has made sacrifices to get him to his position of comfort and moderate wealth and to whom he thus feels obligated. Zhenbao is both a risk taker (he goes to England to study, has affairs, he is a man of the world) and risk averse (he settles into the managerial job, marries the right kind of wife, assumes his family responsibilities). Chang sets up the chess pieces and moves of this story till its ultimate denouement – a stalemate which is not so much of a bang but a whimper of life must go on. It is a very Asian tale that may still take place.

A great deal is of course lost in translation. Chang’s The Golden Cangue (translated by Chang herself) is, for example, firmly set in a feudal past. The cangue of the title is a device for punishment. The story of a girl from an ordinary family of sesame oil merchants who marries the ailing son of an aristocratic family and is slowly undone till she turns into the worst kind of harridan is in itself effective. Chang was apparently a keen follower of old Chinese works and intended to capture their tone and language in The Golden Cangue, it is of course not possible for the non-Chinese reader to appreciate this. One has to assume that since Chang herself was translating (as she did with The Sing Song Girls of Shanghai, itself the basis for Hou Hsiao Hsien's exquisite film, it is the closest we will get to the story's original intent.

Whilst Chang is at her best in her longer short stories or novellas, some of Chang’s short, experimental pieces are also interesting. "Sealed Off" for example is a charming account of a bus ride during the occupation which is impressionistic in nature. In other non-fiction works, she is lively when touching on topics ranging from her friendships in Malaysia to the evolution of women’s fashions in China (Chang clearly loved clothes). Her essay, A Chronicle of Changing Clothes, touches on Chinese history and concurrent fashions but unfortunately is not available unless by subscription - though it is partly available via Google books. Here are the final lines of the essay after describing a man in a dress she finds ridiculous only to think "why not, if it gives him pleasure"?

".........an autumnal chill as dusk approaches and vendors at a vegetable market prepare to pack up and go home. Fish scraps and pale green husks of sweet-kernel corn litter the ground. A child on a bicycle dashes down the street just to show off. He lets out a shout, lets go of the handlebars, and effortlessly shoots past, swaying atop the seat. And in that split second, everyone on the street watches him pass, transfixed by an indefinable sort of admiration. Might it be that in this life that moment of letting go is the loveliest?"

Moushumi Kandali

Moushumi Kandali is a dear friend. As is her husband, Dhruvarka Deka, who was a classmate (in passing, I note that he is a renowned quizmaster).

So I am predisposed to like her collection of short stories, A Tale of Thirdness and Other Stories, that has just been published. A few of the stories have been translated by Dhruvarka. I have read a few stories before, I read them again – each rereading after all gives a new perspective. My only regret is that I cannot read it in the original Assamese (though the translators have done a good job). It is also a bit sad that so much literature published in India remains inaccessible – unless the work gets translated.Moushumi’s work has a number of themes but her strong narrative voice runs through all the stories. Feminism, displacement, the effects of modern culture as also the milieu of the academic world all find a place in the stories. In spite of a number of strong segments that deal with tribal life (e.g. The Crossroads of Mukindon) and a number of references to the Assamese natural world and culture, the stories are not specifically rooted in the region. The juxtaposition in some stories, for e.g. a culture in transition in The Crossroads of Mukindon or the similar predicament of two women across decades in Eternal is familiar in literature per se. Similarly the effect of modern media on ordinary lives (That Eye) or terrorism in the modern world (In Search of a Vanishing God). There is also a futuristic tone in some stories (specifically in Ravan_1020), this didn’t always work for me - but that may be a personal disengagement with the subject matter. In all the stories, there is also another kind of juxtaposition – quotidian detail admixed with the surreal and the absurd. Somehow the mixture and the abrupt shifts of tone work very well in all the stories.

Two stories stood out for me, A Tale of Thirdness and An Arty or Nonsense Kind of Story. Both deal with gender roles but the elliptical nature of the former and a hint of the absurd in the latter lift it far above the genre. Just the catalogue of the days in An Arty or Nonsense Kind of Story makes it stand out. Two others were however my favourites – Anirvan: the Unquenched and Ferns in the Moonlight. There are no discursions and nothing overt in these simple, elegant stories and they bring out Moushumi’s strong, lyrical voice.

The book traveled all the way from Assam to Australia so is quite precious. The accompanying book was Listen my Flowerbud, which is an English translation of Mising poetry from Assam (collated by Jiban Narah and translated by Moushumi). There is a lovely foreword on Mising culture. The poems have a simple charm with an awareness of life in parts – it reminded me a bit of Randhir Khare’s The Singing Bow. A few are elegant and concise in the manner of old Chinese poetry.

Lawrence in Thirroul

It had been awhile since we went to Thirroul so this weekend my brother and I drove down to the seaside town on the South Coast. We first went there because of a chance reading of DH Lawrence's uneven novel, Kangaroo. Lawrence wrote the book when he spent a few months with his wife Freida in Australia in 1922. It has a lot of moaning and groaning about Sydney ("Great swarming, teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally"), the emptiness of Australia and its people and a shadowy fascist organisation with which the narrator (always a Lawrence stand-in) gets involved. Nevertheless, it is Lawrence and therefore interesting. In particular, its description of the land and surrounds sounds fresh even today. Here for example, is his description of his journey to Thirroul, which he fictionalised as Mullumbimby in the novel:

"The land grew steeper—dark, straight hills like cliffs, masked in sombre trees. And then the first plume of colliery smoke among the trees on the hill–face. But they were little collieries, for the most part, where the men just walked into the face of the hill down a tunnel, and they hardly disfigured the land at all. Then the train came out on the sea—lovely bays with sand and grass and trees, sloping up towards the sudden hills that were like a wall. There were bungalows dotted in most of the bays. Then suddenly more collieries, and quite a large settlement of bungalows. From the train they looked down on many many pale–grey zinc roofs, sprinkled about like a great camp, close together, yet none touching, and getting thinner towards the sea."

The collieries must have had some resonance with Lawrence, given his novels. Remarkably, the cottage where Lawrence lived (called Wyewurk) still exists though it is in private hands. Given the brief visit, there is nothing by way of a museum, indeed most Australians are unaware that the writer passed through the country. Consequently, a modest plaque at the end of Craig St. is the only marker.

Lawrence's visit inspired a set of Garry Shead's paintings (below). The novel itself was made into a film, though not one that is well-known.

This weekend, the weather was as Australians are wont to say, glorious. Some fish and chips and a dip in the ocean later we took a few pictures of Craig St. where Lawrence lived. Our quasi-literary pilgrimage was followed by a visit to the Indian temple at Helensburgh. It takes awhile before a temple is integrated with its landscape, in Helensburgh like a Lawrentian novel, the old in a new setting simply lacks an "inner life". The Gods look quite lost in the bush setting.

Pics on top: Plaque at DHL Reserve; the sea from the reserve; DHL bungalow(looking very much like Army bungalows in India). An older image of the house with DHL posing here.

Rooms people write in

Writers' Rooms