bookshelves: read-in-2009
The Inner Life (a name the people at Penguin invented for their excerpts from Thomas à Kempis's famous The Imitation of Christ) rounds out my first set of four Great Ideas volumes. I have to admit that, outside of the context of the series, this fourteenth-century Catholic devotional tract is not something I would normally pick up, find interesting, or recommend to anyone except those with a strong interest in the history of Christian theology. As an agnostic person in particular, trying to find anything in its pages to which I could personally relate was...well, let's just say that wasn't the approach that worked best for me. Within the curated Great Ideas experience, though, it takes part in a number of dialogues I find fascinating. And when I stop to situate Kempis in the context of the other three philosophers I've read in the series thus far, there are even a few points on which I would align myself more with him than with anyone else. More importantly, and beyond my personal reactions, Kempis represents an important phase of Western Christian thought, which I'm sure will prove a key touchstone as I move into the Renaissance writings of Machiavelli and Montaigne.
First, the basics: Thomas à Kempis espouses a characteristically hardcore medieval attitude toward God and faith. He's an absolutist, arguing that one should give up all emotional connection to the people and physical world around one, and put one's entire trust in God. You shouldn't trust other people, your own sensations, or yourself, Kempis writes: humans are changeable and easily tricked by the Devil, and are therefore much too weak and unworthy to make their own life decisions or attain any meaningful knowledge except through complete and utter submission to the will of God. Even the kind of ecstatic devotion espoused by Augustine should, says Kempis, be mistrusted:
CHRIST: ... Do not hold an exaggerated opinion of yourself, or believe that you are a favorite of God when you enjoy the grace of great devotion and sweetness; for it is not by these things that the true lover of holiness is known, or is a man's spiritual progress dependent on such things.
THE DISCIPLE: Lord, on what then does it depend?
CHRIST: On complete surrender of your heart to the will of God, not seeking to have your own way either in great matters or small, in time or in eternity. If you will make this surrender, you will thank God with equal gladness both in good times and in bad, and will accept everything, as from His hand, with an untroubled mind. Be courageous and of such unshakable faith that, when spiritual comfort is withdrawn, you may prepare your heart for even greater trials. Do not think it unjust that you should suffer so much, but confess that I am just in all My dealings, and praise My holy Name.
In other words, says Kempis, a truly devoted follower of Christ will completely subjugate his own desire, and be equally happy with whatever fate God decides is best for him, however uncomfortable or seemingly tragic it may be, because Christ is all-knowing, and is orchestrating the events of each person's life to best suit that person's spiritual growth.
Like Seneca, Kempis counsels his readers to find "a place apart," to spend time alone for the greater health of their souls. But whereas Seneca recommends spending that time reading philosophy, honing our logical minds and reducing mental busy-ness, Kempis's main object for alone time is coming to a deeper appreciation of just how base and unworthy we are to receive the grace of God. He urges us to "enter deeply into inner things," yet also tells us never to trust ourselves or our own impressions. To Kempis this isn't a contradiction: to him, "entering deeply into inner things" means finding lower and ever lower levels of degradation within, which will in turn motivate us to submit more readily to God's will:
It is a great obstacle if we rely on external signs and the experience of the senses, and pay small regard to the perfecting of self-discipline. I hardly know what motives can inspire us, or what our purpose may be, when we who wish to be considered spiritual take so much trouble and are so concerned with trivial, daily affairs, and so seldom give our full and earnest attention to our interior life.
Alas, after a short meditation we break off and do not make a strict examination of our lives. We do not consider where our affections really lie, nor are we grieved at the sinfulness of our whole lives.
This emphasis on discounting the experience of the senses, of eschewing rationality, is one of Kempis's most interesting positions in terms of the Great Ideas dialogue. Let me briefly and perhaps cheekily paraphrase the conversation thus far as it relates to logic and the rational person:
- Seneca writes to a friend: hey, look at your situation logically. Today you're alive, and tomorrow you may be dead. Why not make the most of your remaining time by withdrawing from the hustle and bustle, and spending some time engaging with philosophy? You will hone your mind and prepare your soul for your inevitable death. After all, people complain about having to die, but we really have sufficient time if only we would use it to good advantage.
- Marcus Aurelius, more pessimistically, opines that the world is going to hell because people everywhere are acting against their true natures. The true nature of a man, says Aurelius, is that of a rational citizen, and the only rational way for a citizen to live is to devote himself to the service of his state, rather than becoming a prey to his irrational (carnal, selfish) desires. Rationality, says Aurelius, will save the day, or at least make life more bearable and death less alarming.
- Augustine of Hippo presents a failure of rationality: a moment (his conversion to Catholocism) when, in order to attain enlightenment, he must put aside his desire to know and learn things logically, and follow his emotions to God.
A thousand years later, Thomas à Kempis (and, I think, medieval Christianity in general) have taken Augustine's break with rationality to the proverbial next level, and then several levels beyond that. The temptation to acquire knowledge through the senses or reasoned logic, he argues, is a crafty ploy of the Devil, who is trying to distract us from the fact that praying and submitting our wills to God are the only ways to attain true enlightenment. The entire physical world, therefore, becomes a minefield of temptations for anyone who has incompletely quashed his curiosity or his impulse towards reason. The best plan for anyone wishing to get close to God, in Kempis's view, is to live the life of a hermit:
You should be so mortified in your affection towards loved ones that, for your part, you would forego all human companionship. Man draws the nearer to God as he withdraws further from the consolations of this world. And the deeper he descends into himself and the lower he regards himself, the higher he ascends towards God.
Kempis's attitude is that a holy person should withdraw from nearly every aspect of life on earth, and focus his entire energy on anticipating the next life - the one in which he will be released from this prison of a body and be united with God in peace. "Be assured of this," he writes famously, "that you must live a dying life." If you are gaining pleasure or satisfaction from anything in life other than submitting yourself to God, Kempis argues, you're on the wrong track. And if you're attempting to reason something out logically, you're falling prey to the Devil. Aside from a few token comments about "helping one another," there's even surprisingly few mentions of charity, which I tend to consider a staple of Christian theology. Basically, Kempis's holy man withdraws farther and farther from all other people and objects, and spends his time meditating on what a despicable sinner he is. It's hard for me to imagine a God who would encourage such conduct, but there you go. (And Kristin Lavransdatter people: does this behavior pattern sound familiar?) I mean, this is certainly not how Jesus lived, which makes the title Imitation of Christ an interesting one.
I think what stood out most to me about Thomas à Kempis is the feeling that something had to give. His theology is just so extreme and so bleak. If it's at all representative of the life of the educated "establishment" in late medieval Europe, it impresses the reader with the inevitability of some kind of pressure release, some swing of the pendulum in the other direction - which did in fact take place with the advent of Renaissance Humanism and the return to a desire for proto-scientific inquiry.
On the other hand, I have to admit that I do appreciate Kempis's acknowledgment of the failures of rationality. Reading Marcus Aurelius, I often wanted to shake the man for his blind insistence that Human Beings Are Naturally Rational, even as he was cataloging all the myriad irrational behaviors around him. Falling, myself, somewhere in the middle of the two extremes (I think most people tend to act irrationally and construct rational explanations for our behavior after the fact), it's fascinating to watch the two philosophical strands develop over the centuries. And having already spent some quality time with Machiavelli and Montaigne, the next two stops on the Great Ideas train, I'm pretty confident that they will add some interesting perspectives to the rationality debate. On to Florence, and the demise of the Republic!
PS - Between Augustine, Kempis, and Undset, it's been VERY RELIGIOUS around here lately! I need to read some Emma Goldman or something, just to shake things up a bit. Seriously. ]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
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bookshelves: read-in-2009
I spent the first half of Sula feeling vaguely disappointed at the spare, undeveloped quality of its author's early prose, and the latter half exclaiming at how thoroughly Morrison pulls this novel out of the bag. Some of the late scenes (Sula and Nel's final confrontation on Sula's death bed; the final description of Suicide Day, 1941) will probably haunt me for years, and Nel's final realization in the last three pages of the book is heart-wrenching. Nonetheless, even after reading the last page, I still felt that this short novel is made of a different substance than certain other Morrison works, like Beloved and Song of Solomon. Covering over forty years in under two hundred pages, much of its plot and characterization are implied and suggested, rather than explicitly developed. One online reviewer referred to it as a fable, and I think that's a useful approach. Sula, Nel, Eva, and their poor black hillside neighborhood (called "the Bottom" despite being perched on a hill) are allegorial - or rather, they often treat each other and themselves as allegorical, denying their own humanity, and one "moral" of the Morrison's fable is how harmful that treatment can be.
Like other Morrison novels, there is a complicated love/hate nostalgia at play in Sula; as the novel opens, we are told that even now its setting, the hillside ghetto known as "The Bottom," is largely destroyed, and that soon all trace of it will have vanished in the sweep of "progress." And while there is a definite sadness at the disappearance of this place, in which the dramas and everyday lives of human beings unfolded, that sadness doesn't eclipse the narrator's anger and disgust at the more inhuman aspects of life in the Bottom. She lets her love of the nurturing and even the gritty, enduring parts of Bottom life coexist with her other feelings:
It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones kept talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn - and the rich white folks. Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left...
I think that line is so telling: "Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place." On the one hand, this is Nel as a middle-aged woman, disapproving of all the jargon talked by the young kids who are more in love with ideas than the realities in front of them. In another way, though, the poverty and cruel conditions of life in the Bottom do erode its ability to be a "community" in the positive sense: in one scene, a grown woman asks her mother if she ever loved them (the children), and her mother tells her probably not, "Not the way you thinkin'." Hannah means, did her mother ever play with the children, snuggle them, and Eva reminds her that people need food and time for that kind of loving:
"You want me to tickle you under the jaw and forget 'bout them sores in your mouth? Pearl was shittin' worms and I was supposed to play rang-around the rosie? [...:] Wasn't no time. Not none. With you all coughin' and me watchin' so TB wouldn't take you off and if you was sleepin' quiet I thought, O Lord, they dead and put my hand over your mouth to feel if the breath was comin' what you talkin' bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you can't you get that through your thick head or what is that between your ears, heifer?"
Eva's narrative is moving - she obviously cares about her family - but her harshness toward her daughter is also hard to read. One of the themes of Sula is the ways in which love is perverted by poverty, and also, paradoxically, by the desire for upward mobility, for gentility and acceptance. When Sula, Hannah's daughter, returns unmarried, college-educated, selfish and sexually omnivorous to the Bottom as an adult, her very badness serves to transform the place into the community it may not previously have been. She becomes the collective scapegoat. To some extent she earns her reputation and to some extent the townsfolk embellish it, but in a way it hardly matters: she's the foil that makes everyone else kinder toward one another, more tolerant, better fathers to their children and wives to their husbands. They band together against a perceived common foe. And later, when Sula is no longer in the town, these benefits start to unravel; with no resistance against which to push, their relationships veer off the tracks. Morrison doesn't really take a stand on the darkness of this vision - that the people in her novel need an enemy in order to be bothered to love each other properly. It's a reality she just lays out for the reader to see, like she portrays the Bottom in all its beauty, ugliness, and erosion. Sula becomes an integral part of life in the Bottom, even though the townsfolk shun and condemn her. Neither her behavior nor their condemnation is particularly righteous, but both are forces of nature.
In fact, one of the most interesting things about Sula its examination of how things we may not like, or even notice, become so integrated into our lives that we use them as reference points. Sula becomes the townsfolks' reference point for an evil woman, just like the iconoclastic holiday "Suicide Day," started by a shell-shocked, cowbell-toting WWI veteran in 1919, becomes a reference point for the passing days and years.
In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language, into their lives.
Someone said to a friend, "You sure was a long time delivering that baby. How long was you in labor?"
And the friend answered, "'Bout three days. The pains started on Suicide Day and kept up till the following Sunday. Was borned on Sunday. All my boys is Sunday boys."
Some lover said to his bride-to-be, "Let's do it after New Years, 'stead of before. I get paid New Years Eve."
And his sweetheart answered, "OK, but make sure it ain't on Suicide Day. I ain't 'bout to be listening to no cowbells whilst the weddin's going on."
Likewise, the two protagonists, Nel and Sula, become the touchstones of each others' emotional lives without fully realizing it's happened. And even after their relationship has been corroded by the selfish independence of Sula and the hard bitterness of Nel, both women continue to think of the other whenever they have a particular realization, or when something happens (or doesn't happen) in their lives. "Wait'll I tell Nel," thinks Sula, while Nel chastises herself for thinking of Sula "as though they were still friends and talked things over." Part of the tragedy of Sula is that the women don't have the resources to recognize the worth of what they have, and another part of it is that they can't find a way to regain what they've lost. Yet another part, it seems to me, is that despite supposedly being the closest of friends, having lived together through "the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price," there is still some core of existence in each woman that passes completely outside the understanding of the other.
Sula is a story with a fundamental loneliness at its core. I'm reminded of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's famous argument that all human beings live and die alone. One of the the only ways for characters in the Bottom to connect is to demonize another human; real, genuine connection is always sabotaged or undervalued. And although it's hard to deny the egregiousness of some of Sula's cruelties, it's also hard to dismiss her cry:
My lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.
As I've written about Sula, I've realized how deep its questions and motifs go. It's really a small, finely-turned gem, although I wouldn't have gotten nearly as much out of it if I hadn't stopped to articulate my reading experience. In that way, I suppose it's similar to the Faulkner I just reviewed: it has much to offer to the reader who can offer something in return. ]]>
bookshelves: read-in-2009
Theoretically, my latest journey through Faulkner's southern Gothic masterpiece was a re-read. I knew I'd read it before, long ago, but I wasn't sure exactly how long ago until I riffled through it and discovered, nestled between the pages, a three-day visitor pass for the New Orleans public transportation system. I've only been to New Orleans once, which means I last read The Sound and the Fury at the tender age of fourteen, over a chilly January weekend in a hotel in the French Quarter. You have to admire my sense of effective setting. The ironwork grilles, pedestrian arcades and melancholy street performers must have made an evocative backdrop to this tale of familial disintegration in the American South.
Needless to say, however, considering my former youth and relative lack of familiarity with modernist literature, I remembered almost nothing about the novel before picking it up again this time. In fact, I remembered SO little about it that I actually made a list before I started re-reading. This is literally every single thing I could bring to mind about the novel, besides my assumption that, being Faulkner, it would be set in Mississippi:
<ul>
<li>Four sections told from different perspectives;</li>
<li>Siblings/family saga</li>
<li>First section is from the perspective of the mentally retarded brother;</li>
<li>Brother/sister incest (?);</li>
<li>A scene where a young girl climbs a tree and a boy (her brother?) can see her underwear.</li></ul>
As you can see, my grasp of the finer plot points was incomplete. Although my question mark in "Brother/sister incest (?)" turned out to be surprisingly accurate, I think the last item actually conflates three different scenes, two in this book and one in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada (in which the girl in question is actually not wearing any underwear! Salacious!). And while the first three items are true as far as they go, they don't exactly add up to the most memorable reading experience.
This time around, though, I thoroughly appreciated The Sound and the Fury. Having read other Faulkner since (most recently Absalom! Absalom!), I was prepared for consistently ponderous, florid-seeming prose, but Faulkner really carries off four distinct narrative voices in his four different sections. We get Benjy's jumpy, grief-stricken stream of consciousness, in which past, present and future are compressed into a single pane of existence; Quentin's obsessive, impotent gallantry and inability to reconcile his past with his present; Jason's flinty-cold, self-justifying righteousness; and the final section, the only one told in what I think of as "Faulknerian" prose, which is told in the third person and focuses on the inexplicably faithful servants in the Compson house. In each section, the same basic story is refracted through a different sensibility, revealing a new set of separate but overlapping facets, until the reader gradually pieces together what happened to the Compson family: how they loved each other, hated each other, and tore themselves to pieces.
If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
This is one of those books, so many of them modernist, which are sometimes charged with "ruining the literary scene" and "turning literature into an exclusionary, unreadable mess." Forget that I think such claims are a big pile of poop; I'd still like to talk about why I think Faulkner's decisions here are so effective. Because basically, my opinion is this: while the style of the novel is indeed challenging at times, it's all in the service of something that's the OPPOSITE of exclusionary. To me, The Sound and the Fury operates on the same set of audience-baiting techniques that fuel the public's perpetual interest in crime novels. As a reader, Faulkner feeds me just enough information to whet my appetite about what's happened in the Compson house, yet denies me complete understanding until the very end. This doesn't seem to me obnoxiously elitist; it seems like good, solid storytelling technique.
The Sound and the Fury takes, no doubt, more effort on the reader's part than a more standard, whodunit-style story. But there are also many more levels on which the mysteries unfold, and all of those levels are interrelated, making it also much more interesting, at least to me. A reader beginning Faulkner's novel must first ascertain what's going on with the narrating voice: being thrown into Benjy's world, which isn't separated into past, present, and future, is disconcerting, a melange of jerky transitions, italics and effects without causes. As I began to get my bearings, I realized that italicized text signaled that Benjy was beginning to experience something, a scene from the past that had been triggered in his mind by the thoughts or events just preceding in the narrative (often themselves things that happened in the past). He relives these scenes with such vivid feeling that they're indistinguishable from the present, and, as his story progresses, the implied "triggers" that cause him to transition from one scene to another provide intriguing clues about the family's past and present. Why does Benjy cry when he looks at himself in a mirror? Why does Quentin seem sometimes to be male and at other times female? Why are certain places - the basement, the tree by the window - so packed with triggers for Benjy? How did the family decide that saying a certain name is taboo? Moving from one's first impressions to the point of asking questions like these is a bit like emerging from an atmospheric fog bank, and watching the landscape take its gradual shape.
With the transitions from one section to the next, Faulkner even creates cliffhangers: at the end of Benjy's section we share Benjy's priorities, and want to learn the answers to the questions he raises. Instead, we're spirited eighteen years back in time to Quentin's narrative, which introduces us to a whole new set of obsessions and motivations. By the time we're done meandering with the morose Harvard student around the Italian slums of Boston, we feel tenderly frustrated with him, and invested in his ominous trajectory - but we're suddenly yanked back to the day before Benjy's section, where we encounter the thoroughly unpleasant Jason. Every section helps to fit more pieces into place regarding plot, causes, and effects, but the author entices his audience masterfully in the meantime, and lets us swim in the stream of each character's thoughts and associations. It's not only a beautiful example of the old writing-class chestnut "Show, don't tell," but it allows the gaps and jumps in each narrative to reveal as much as the words that surround them. The prose takes on the texture of a canyon landscape, whose real substance is contained in yawning chasms not immediately visible from the ground.
(As a side-note, the sections in the Italian slums around Boston in 1910 were particularly intriguing to me because my partner David's paternal family are Italian-Americans from the greater Boston area. His grandmother was born in 1916, but the area in which she lived would have been very similar to that around which Quentin leads the little girl he meets in the bread shop.)
My point is that Faulkner's difficult prose serves a concrete function in terms of the narrative, and I think it performs that function extremely well. The Sound and the Fury felt more taut and well-controlled to me than Absalom, Absalom!. I think the structural challenges Faulkner set himself in this novel really brought out the best in him, and made for a gorgeous and suspenseful reading experience for me. ]]>
Emily
read and liked
Paul's
review of The Sound and the Fury:
"Somehow I earned a degree in English Lit w/o ever reading Faulkner. This was the first I’ve read of his and I can’t say enough about it. This book haunts you. Here’s the thing. You know that feeling you get when you hear a song or see a face th...more "
"Somehow I earned a degree in English Lit w/o ever reading Faulkner. This was the first I’ve read of his and I can’t say enough about it. This book haunts you. Here’s the thing. You know that feeling you get when you hear a song or see a face th...more "
bookshelves: currently-reading
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by David Mitchell
Does your husband know about this boyfriend? ]]>
bookshelves: read-in-2009
Believe it or not, I started this little history over a month ago: while I was wading through the blood and guts of Blood Meridian, I occasionally needed something with which to decompress, to take my mind off the gore and scalpings and other grotesqueries that make up McCarthy's novel. And what could be less offensive or more charming to a knitter like myself than Richard Rutt's classic treatise A History of Hand Knitting? Nothing, that's what. I leapt in and interspersed passages from Rutt whenever McCarthy got to be a little too much, a method that kept up my enjoyment of both books quite nicely until I finished the McCarthy and was left with unmitigated Rutt. At which point I immediately stalled. Don't get me wrong, Rutt has his excellent points: he's not only a knowledgeable guide through the history of my craft in the British Isles, but also thoroughly and unintentionally hilarious as only an Englishman can be. I could picture him (in my mind he looks a lot like John Cleese), sitting by his living-room fire with his brandy-snifter, wearing his clerical collar and discoursing with affable long-windedness about various aspects of his pet subject, perhaps boring his house-guests with his strong opinions, although they would probably be too polite to say so. Take this passage, in which he puts forth his view on the proper term for "plain knitting" (the most basic knitted fabric, flat on one side and bumpy on the other):
This fabric is known in the British Isles as 'stocking stitch', a clumsy name including the imprecise word 'stitch.' It was formerly known as 'stockinet', which was probably derived from 'stocking-net.' In America it is called 'stockinette', with a fancy Frenchification of the spelling which is curiously at odds with the rationalism of received American spelling. The older English word has much to recommend it, and I have used it freely in this book.
Oh, Bishop Rutt. So much is funny to me here: his bluntness in bemoaning the "clumsiness" of the term "stocking stitch"; his disapproval of us Americans and our inconsistency in allowing a "fancy Frenchification" to enter our vocabulary; his reversion to a superior English word (of course the English word is superior!), and his neglect of any English-speaking knitters outside the British/American dichotomy. We don't know the term used by Australian and Canadian knitters, and frankly, implies Rutt, we don't care. (As far as I know, Rutt's "fancy Frenchification" has since become the worldwide standard; an overwhelming percentage of the global population of Ravelry.com uses "stockinette.")
After the introduction and definition-of-terms sections, Rutt's style settles down to business and becomes a bit dryer. It also becomes a bit more...disorganized. Rutt seems, to me, to belong to the old school of amateur nonfiction writers, laboring away at their books in their off hours, imbuing their manuscripts with their own quirks and biases, and never being exposed to much rigor in the way of editing or streamlining their texts. At times, Rutt's book seems less like a unified narration and more like a series of marginally collected notes: in the section on knitting during the Victorian period, for example, Rutt is in full swing discussing the popularity, among women at home, of knitting for English troops during the Crimean War. Then, with no warning or transition, the reader is faced with the new section-heading "Teacosies," which begins "Teacosies were invented by the Victorians, but, though some connoisseurs of tea believe cosies spoil tea by stewing it, they are not decorative trivia." No connection is ever made between the Crimean War and the vogue for teacosies, which is understandable, because there isn't one. Nonetheless, a basic run-down in high-school-level paragraph transitions would have done a lot to streamline the logic of Rutt's text. I found that it got even choppier as it progressed, degenerating into a series of mostly-unconnected short biographies of the major designers and knitting innovators of the twentieth century.
Rutt is also big into debunking knitting myths. From a historical perspective, I respect and applaud him for his accuracy on this, but at times he comes across as a bit of a wet blanket. About half the section headings feature Rutt dismantling one errant idea or another: in the section on fishermens' ganseys, for example (a traditional form of knitted shirt made around the coastline of England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), he discusses the common romantic notion that each clan or family had a characteristic set of stitch patterns that were passed down through the generations. Not true, says Rutt: all over England, ganseys looked the same. (He discredits this same idea all over again in the section on Aran cabled jumpers.) In the afore-mentioned section about the Crimean War, he discusses the popular idea that the garment "balaclava" got its name from the Battle of Balaclava, and that this is the first place soldiers wore such a thing. Untrue! cries Rutt: the garments themselves existed long before the war, and the modern name for them didn't come into use until many years afterward. Alright then. LIkewise, while it's true that the term "cardigan" derives from the title of the Earl of Cardigan, the man who led the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade, Rutt hastens to assure us that
There is no evidence that he wore such a garment during the three short months he spent in the Crimea...A "cardigan body warmer" might have suited his needs, but, if he had one in the Crimea, nobody recorded it. It is more likely that he used the garment during his last years at Deene Park, Northamptonshire. English country houses were notoriously cold.
And so on. I certainly wouldn't want Rutt to sacrifice accuracy, but he seems to take greater glee in debunking romantic misconceptions than in communicating the truly amazing and unusual aspects of knitting history, or even conveying an interest in his subject.
And there are many interesting tidbits stashed away in this book of his, if only he would highlight them. (See that subject transition? Eh?) For example, he discusses the moral outrage that accompanied the rise of knitting during the Elizabethan era: ministers were preaching against it from the pulpit, a fact which is sure to bring a smile to any modern knitter's face. It turns out that stocking-knitting became big business in Elizabethan times, primarily because of the male fashion for extremely short "trunk hose" giving way to brilliantly-colored, tight-fitting stockings (the classic "men in tights" look). Apparently, the fashion in stockings for upper-class men changed so frequently and dramatically that poor cottagers all over England could make extra money by churning out the newest style and selling their wares to wealthy Londoners. In fact, so fickle were the fashions that, even though machine knitting had been invented, it wouldn't really be practical for another hundred years: a machine was a large capital investment that could only knit one type of stocking, whereas a hand-knitter was infinitely versatile and could start immediately. Women's stockings were less flamboyant, but still too showy for many preachers, who reprimanded Elizabethan ladies for their vanity and lack of modesty in showing off their legs. (No record of reprimands to the men, whose outfits were even more revealing.)
Anyway, not something I would recommend except to those seriously committed to learning more about the subject, who are probably the only people who would be tempted to pick it up in the first place. So it's all good. ]]>