Laura Kalpakian's Blog, page 12
August 31, 2015
Remember/September
The rhyming pattern here is cosmic. September is indeed the month when one feels the undertow of the past. One season seeps into another. The death implicit in autumn creeps up and over the summer, obscuring it finally from view. The natural world pales and puckers. The wind stirs leaves and debris in small, insistent eddies. Temperatures dip. Children return to school.
I am not among those who love autumn. Quite the contrary. To me autumn is a lot of death masquerading as drama. I quickly tire of the endless black and orange draped everywhere leading up to Halloween, then a spate of russet and brown for Thanksgiving. Autumn seems to me a long, unlovely plunge toward Christmas and January.
But I do love September, the diminished light, the odd scent in the air that is decidedly not summer, and the lunar tug of the past as one more year rounds its way towards winter.
This September Red Wheelbarrow Writers have launched the first annual Memoir Writing Month. When Cami Ostman broached me with her idea last spring, I instantly opted for September for this undertaking We’re calling it WhaMemWriMo. Whatcom [County] Write Your Memoir Month. Our idea is is modeled on NaNoWriMo. That is to say, every day in the thirty days hath September you write about 1600 words of a memoir. At the end of the month, the writer has amassed about 50,000 words. A book. Well, a draft. Probably the draft stinks, but what of it? You can use the winter to edit, condense, connect, enlarge upon your work. The important thing is to have draft in hand to work from.
Red Wheelbarrow Writers, working in connection with Village Books and Chuckanut Writers and Dwyer Café are working collectively to make WhaMemWriMo a success for writers everywhere. We have a website. We have a FB page. We have lots of communal activities planned to wrench writers from their lonely studies and bring them together through the Dwyer Café, Write-Outs. Or more informally, meeting by accident or design at coffeeshops or bars to talk, to write, to think about Memoir—which is to say, to think about Memory, and the ways in which memory committed to paper assumes literary form.
We’re offering a class every Thursday in September at Village Books, beginning with one I am teaching on September 3. However, you do not have to live in Whatcom County or be a Red Wheelbarrow Writer to join us. If you are interested in memory, in the literature and practice of memoir, tune in to our pages and sites. Red Wheelbarrow Writers have a lively core of committed compatriots (we loosely refer to ourselves as the Bored of Directors so as not to be pompous asses) and many of us will be posting here and on FB often. Join the discussion before September itself is but a memory.
August 12, 2015
Echoes from THE MUSIC ROOM
Not surprisingly, the idea for my novel, The Music Room came to me at a concert on a winter’s night eight years ago. Watching the young solo violinist rip majestically through Mendelssohn’s Hebrides symphony, my thoughts roamed away from the stage. I pondered the tremendous pressures on her to convey the hours, days, perhaps years of rehearsal into a thirty minute moment of performance perfection. Then the applause. The bow. Finito. That moment, once passed, is gone— and until the advent of recorded sound, some 125 years ago—gone forever. Performance is finite. Rehearsal goes on forever.
Is the musician’s incessant rehearsing akin to the writer’s eking out many drafts? I don’t think so. Writers write and re-write, and though the book itself passes through many hands (agent, editor, copyeditor, production people, publicist,) it emerges often without fanfare or applause. No bow. Sorry. And once published, the writer does not return to rework it. No second chance to right what was wrong, as a musician can with the next performance.
Moreover, for the most part, writers work alone. Music and drama, on the other hand, are collective undertakings. Musicians and composers and actors and dramatists actively require the input of others to bring any given work to fruition. Without the composer’s work, the cellist has nothing to play. Without the band to enrich the song, the songwriter might as well just sing in the shower. For musicians (and for actors and dramatists) each undertaking creates new professional and often personal relationships. In working together artists connect, come to recognize whom to trust. These relationships, in turn often open up into future endeavours, broadening everyone’s horizons.
In The Music Room Gloria’s endless rehearsing involves no one but herself. In this she is more like a writer than a musician. Gloria imagines (or remembers) some joyous moment of performance, applause, public recognition for her talents, even her genius. However, in her dedication to rehearsal, to grooming, perfecting her repertoire, Gloria has lost some crucial connection to the world. She has also lost a central element of musical life. Musicians are not meant to be alone. Even if, and as she achieves perfection, Gloria has atrophied, wizened as a human being.
Gloria Denham seems to me a splendid example of the artist as pathetic character, isolated from anything and anyone who might have given her life richness and savor. Her willful ignorance only underscores her pathos. Her gorgeous music room with its brilliant acoustics ought to have exalted the collective efforts of many musicians, and at one time it did. When that moment passed, it became a sort of cell, Gloria its prisoner in solitary confinement. Ironically, Gloria finally trades that room for the chance to perform, to play in front of an audience of sycophants who are waiting for her to die.
Thematically The Music Room asks: what do the arts extract from people who practice them? What does the artists’ obsession, their single-minded pursuit, oblige from spouses, children, parents, the people who live with or around them? Musicians, composers, painters, actors, writers must, of necessity, carve time from everything else in life to give to their work. There will be costs and losses, just as surely as there will be moments of glory. The costs and losses in this novel are borne by two children, Marcella and Rose-Renee, detritus, in their parents’ nasty divorce, debris in their family’s egotistical pursuit of the arts.
My two sons, both musicians, have taught me a lot about music, about rehearsal and performance. When they were in high school rehearsals were always at our house. As they moved out into the world, I have attended their various gigs and concerts, recitals and recording dates. While the performances are exhilarating, my favourite part of the experience is rehearsal. I like sitting at the back of an unfilled theatre, a sparsely furnished rehearsal room, an empty nightclub, or in the recording booth at the studio, and listening to the start-and-stop, the mis-steps, the sometimes tedious repetition leading to the “Let’s move on” moment. Then they begin the same process on the next part of the program or the piece. I enjoy sound-check just before the show. The guy at the soundboard barks at everyone. The musicians oblige him, but hold themselves in check: every bit of psychic energy must be saved up to walk out in front of the audience. Performance.
In the months just before I went to the Mendelssohn Hebrides concert that inspired THE MUSIC ROOM, I had watched my eldest son Bear conduct an orchestra of some eighty musicians, and watched my youngest, Brendan give his all onstage at a rock venue. After being part of their bright, communal musical life, to return home, to this well-known room to write, seemed suddenly very lonely. It was winter and the days were short and sunless. The Hebrides concert inspired me to create, at least on paper, the noisy lives of children who live with music lilting through their lives. I wrote for a few months, finished a full draft, but then abandoned the book. Over the course of some seven years, I returned to the novel, and then left it again. The form changed, the title changed, but the story always stayed the same.
I intended to dedicate THE MUSIC ROOM to Bear and Brendan McCreary. But now I have a little grand-daughter, fittingly, for a musical family, named Sonatine. So, of course, THE MUSIC ROOM is for her. I expect one day to attend her rehearsals too.
The Music Room published July 2015 by Buried River Press, an imprint of Robert Hale Ltd.
July 28, 2015
Echoes from THE MUSIC ROOM
Not surprisingly, the idea for my novel, The Music Room came to me at a concert on a winter’s night eight years ago. Watching the young solo violinist rip majestically through Mendelssohn’s Hebrides symphony, my thoughts roamed away from the stage. I pondered the tremendous pressures on her to convey the hours, days, perhaps years of rehearsal into a thirty minute moment of performance perfection. Then the applause. The bow. Finito. That moment, once passed, is gone— and until the advent of recorded sound, some 125 years ago—gone forever. Performance is finite. Rehearsal goes on forever.
Is the musician’s incessant rehearsing akin to the writer’s eking out many drafts? I don’t think so. Writers write and re-write, and though the book itself passes through many hands (agent, editor, copyeditor, production people, publicist,) it emerges often without fanfare or applause. No bow. Sorry. And once published, the writer does not return to rework it. No second chance to right what was wrong, as a musician can with the next performance.
Moreover, for the most part, writers work alone. Music and drama, on the other hand, are collective undertakings. Musicians and composers and actors and dramatists actively require the input of others to bring any given work to fruition. Without the composer’s work, the cellist has nothing to play. Without the band to enrich the song, the songwriter might as well just sing in the shower. For musicians (and for actors and dramatists) each undertaking creates new professional and often personal relationships. In working together artists connect, come to recognize whom to trust. These relationships, in turn often open up into future endeavours, broadening everyone’s horizons.
In The Music Room Gloria’s endless rehearsing involves no one but herself. In this she is more like a writer than a musician. Gloria imagines (or remembers) some joyous moment of performance, applause, public recognition for her talents, even her genius. However, in her dedication to rehearsal, to grooming, perfecting her repertoire, Gloria has lost some crucial connection to the world. She has also lost a central element of musical life. Musicians are not meant to be alone. Even if, and as she achieves perfection, Gloria has atrophied, wizened as a human being.
Gloria Denham seems to me a splendid example of the artist as pathetic character, isolated from anything and anyone who might have given her life richness and savor. Her willful ignorance only underscores her pathos. Her gorgeous music room with its brilliant acoustics ought to have exalted the collective efforts of many musicians, and at one time it did. When that moment passed, it became a sort of cell, Gloria its prisoner in solitary confinement. Ironically, Gloria finally trades that room for the chance to perform, to play in front of an audience of sycophants who are waiting for her to die.
Thematically The Music Room asks: what do the arts extract from people who practice them? What does the artists’ obsession, their single-minded pursuit, oblige from spouses, children, parents, the people who live with or around them? Musicians, composers, painters, actors, writers must, of necessity, carve time from everything else in life to give to their work. There will be costs and losses, just as surely as there will be moments of glory. The costs and losses in this novel are borne by two children, Marcella and Rose-Renee, detritus, in their parents’ nasty divorce, debris in their family’s egotistical pursuit of the arts.
My two sons, both musicians, have taught me a lot about music, about rehearsal and performance. When they were in high school rehearsals were always at our house. As they moved out into the world, I have attended their various gigs and concerts, recitals and recording dates. While the performances are exhilarating, my favorite part of the experience is rehearsal. I like sitting at the back of an unfilled theatre, a sparsely furnished rehearsal room, an empty nightclub, or in the recording booth at the studio, and listening to the start-and-stop, the mis-steps, the sometimes tedious repetition leading to the “Let’s move on” moment. Then they begin the same process on the next part of the program or the piece. I enjoy sound-check just before the show. The guy at the soundboard barks at everyone. The musicians oblige him, but hold themselves in check: every bit of psychic energy must be saved up to walk out in front of the audience. Performance.
In the months just before I went to the Mendelssohn Hebrides concert that inspired THE MUSIC ROOM, I had watched my eldest son Bear conduct an orchestra of some eighty musicians, and watched my youngest, Brendan give his all onstage at a rock venue. After being part of their bright, communal musical life, to return home, to this well-known room to write, seemed suddenly very lonely. It was winter and the days were short and sunless. Writing this novel gave me, at least on paper, the noisy lives of children who live with music lilting through their lives. I wrote for a few months, finished a full draft, but then abandoned the book. Over the course of some seven years, I returned to the novel, and then left it again. The form changed, the title changed, but the story always stayed the same.
I intended to dedicate THE MUSIC ROOM to Bear and Brendan McCreary. But now I have a little grand-daughter, fittingly, for a musical family, named Sonatine. So, of course, THE MUSIC ROOM is for her. I expect one day to attend her rehearsals too.
The Music Room published July 2015 by Buried River Press, an imprint of Robert Hale Ltd.
May 20, 2015
RWB Book Club: Mothers in Fiction
Additionally we have an informal book club that meets the second Sunday of each month in the lobby of Pickford Cinema at 4 also to drink wine, eat snacks and talk about the books we have loved organized around a monthly theme. Again, no dues save to contribute toward the wine. You can see what’s important here.
For our May the RWB Book Club theme was, not surprisingly, Mothers. This turned out to be more difficult than many of us imagined. In our discussion last Sunday, of course Mommy Dearest made an appearance among other titles where the mother was a force for destruction. As a group we marveled at the paucity of novels with good mothers. Indeed, the more we talked, we noted that if the mothers in memorable books or novels were not nasty unto evil, then often they were comic or symbolic. One reader was so completely daunted, she chose books like Jane Eyre where girls who were motherless made their way in the world as successful, if challenged adults. The only strong, positive mother I could think of was Lucia Santa from The Fortunate Pilgrim, Mario Puzo’s first novel. There’s the mother in Little Women, a model of loving decorum, but face it, boring. One reader brought the children’s book, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree in which the maternal tree yields up its everything to and for the demanding child. Is that the good mother? I hope not since the tree finally expired.
Thoughts, readers? Where are the good mothers in fiction?
Here were my choices for the RWB Book Club theme of Mothers
Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Ma Joad is a rough-hewn Madonna, without the Madonna’s grace or good looks, but full of her enduring strength in the face of tragedy. As the uprooted, impoverished Joads make their way west to California, Ma is their guiding spirit and driving force, even if she’s not behind the wheel. She gives the clan courage to forbear against the poverty, contempt and hard times. California turns out not to be the Golden State for the Joads and people like them.
If Ma Joad is like the Madonna, she is also like the Buddha, unmoving; she does not grow or change. Other than enduring, she is not a textured character. Steinbeck, for all his writerly gifts, could not write women. Women in his novels are either totally sexless pillars of strength and wisdom (Ma Joad) or jezebel harlots, who use sex as a weapon (Cathy in East of Eden), or possibly tender, cheerful whores like the girls in Sweet Thursday. That said, The Grapes of Wrath as a whole circles round the maternal principle, beginning to end. Who can forget that final scene when a young mother (Ma’s daughter) has just given birth to a dead child, and yet she offers her breast to suckle a starving man.
Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The opening scene of The Scarlet Letter is probably permanently imprinted on the minds of everyone who had to read it in high school: Hester Prynne, her “A” glittering in the New England sunlight, strides toward the site of her public degradation, squalling proof of her sin borne proudly in her arms. Sin, rather than motherhood, fascinated Hawthorne. Sex as the Original Sin forever warped the lives of women destined to bear unwanted out-of-wedlock children. Hester Prynne, however, is no cringing, knocked up girl; from the beginning, she is a woman, her wild heart finding solace in the wild forest; her innate dignity allows her to endure the town’s contempt. Contempt, as the novel progresses, tinged with mystery, even admiration.
Hester is the original American Single Mother. (Her child, the impish Pearl, is one of the strangest children in American literature.) Unlike Ma Joad, whom one cannot imagine either in the throes of passion, or the throes of childbirth, Hester’s having borne a child testifies to sex as well as sin. Beneath her puritan grays, and her scarlet letter, and despite Hawthorne’s often tortured prose, the reader always feels that a real woman’s heart beats in Hester’s breast. Why else has she been ongoingly interesting for over a 150 years?
Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
At the opposite end of the suffering spectrum is the delightful minor character, Mrs. Nickleby. She is mother to Kate and Nicholas, the eponymous hero of Dickens’ third novel. Mothers don’t usually fare well in Dickens’ work, or even appear. His main characters are mostly orphaned or abandoned, motherless at the very least. So the widowed Mrs. Nickleby is something of a standout. In her nonstop nattering, her ricocheting segues, her boundless blather Dickens has created a wonderfully comic character.
Mrs. Nickelby is saved from the taint of towering egotism by her good heart, her being totally clueless, and her devotion to her children (who protect her from the perils they actually face). Mrs. Nickleby is a completely conventional matron who cannot think ill of anyone, even the vilest villain in the novel. She may be silly, but she enlivens every page on which she appears. I love this book. Dickens’ irrepressible narrative energy is everywhere abundant, splashing like a fountain; the scenes and prose are vivid and visceral. Nicholas Nickleby does not have the gravity or ambition of the later works, but it the best of the early books.
Lucia Santa in Mario Puzo’s THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM
This was Puzo’s first novel, and his lifelong favorite. It is a story based on his mother, and a vivid tale of immigrant life in New York in the Twenties. Lucia Santa has had two husbands, both disappointments (put kindly) and both gone. She struggles to keep her family together, to keep her dignity intact, to insist on respect. Many of the children are young adults with their own wishes, whims and ideas, but Lucia prevails. In my opinion she is a more vivid character than Don Corleone.
RWB Book Club: Mothers in Fiction
Additionally we have an informal book club that meets the second Sunday of each month in the lobby of Pickford Cinema at 4 also to drink wine, eat snacks and talk about the books we have loved organized around a monthly theme. Again, no dues save to contribute toward the wine. You can see what’s important here.
For our May the RWB Book Club theme was, not surprisingly, Mothers. This turned out to be more difficult than many of us imagined. In our discussion last Sunday, of course Mommy Dearest made an appearance among other titles where the mother was a force for destruction. As a group we marveled at the paucity of novels with good mothers. Indeed, the more we talked, we noted that if the mothers in memorable books or novels were not nasty unto evil, then often they were comic or symbolic. One reader was so completely daunted, she chose books like Jane Eyre where girls who were motherless made their way in the world as successful, if challenged adults. The only strong, positive mother I could think of was Lucia Santa from The Fortunate Pilgrim, Mario Puzo’s first novel. There’s the mother in Little Women, a model of loving decorum, but face it, boring. One reader brought the children’s book, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree in which the maternal tree yields up its everything to and for the demanding child. Is that the good mother? I hope not since the tree finally expired.
Thoughts, readers? Where are the good mothers in fiction?
Here were my choices for the RWB Book Club theme of Mothers
Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Ma Joad is a rough-hewn Madonna, without the Madonna’s grace or good looks, but full of her enduring strength in the face of tragedy. As the uprooted, impoverished Joads make their way west to California, Ma is their guiding spirit and driving force, even if she’s not behind the wheel. She gives the clan courage to forbear against the poverty, contempt and hard times. California turns out not to be the Golden State for the Joads and people like them.
If Ma Joad is like the Madonna, she is also like the Buddha, unmoving; she does not grow or change. Other than enduring, she is not a textured character. Steinbeck, for all his writerly gifts, could not write women. Women in his novels are either totally sexless pillars of strength and wisdom (Ma Joad) or jezebel harlots, who use sex as a weapon (Cathy in East of Eden), or possibly tender, cheerful whores like the girls in Sweet Thursday. That said, The Grapes of Wrath as a whole circles round the maternal principle, beginning to end. Who can forget that final scene when a young mother (Ma’s daughter) has just given birth to a dead child, and yet she offers her breast to suckle a starving man.
Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The opening scene of The Scarlet Letter is probably permanently imprinted on the minds of everyone who had to read it in high school: Hester Prynne, her “A” glittering in the New England sunlight, strides toward the site of her public degradation, squalling proof of her sin borne proudly in her arms. Sin, rather than motherhood, fascinated Hawthorne. Sex as the Original Sin forever warped the lives of women destined to bear unwanted out-of-wedlock children. Hester Prynne, however, is no cringing, knocked up girl; from the beginning, she is a woman, her wild heart finding solace in the wild forest; her innate dignity allows her to endure the town’s contempt. Contempt, as the novel progresses, tinged with mystery, even admiration.
Hester is the original American Single Mother. (Her child, the impish Pearl, is one of the strangest children in American literature.) Unlike Ma Joad, whom one cannot imagine either in the throes of passion, or the throes of childbirth, Hester’s having borne a child testifies to sex as well as sin. Beneath her puritan grays, and her scarlet letter, and despite Hawthorne’s often tortured prose, the reader always feels that a real woman’s heart beats in Hester’s breast. Why else has she been ongoingly interesting for over a 150 years?
Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
At the opposite end of the suffering spectrum is the delightful minor character, Mrs. Nickleby. She is mother to Kate and Nicholas, the eponymous hero of Dickens’ third novel. Mothers don’t usually fare well in Dickens’ work, or even appear. His main characters are mostly orphaned or abandoned, motherless at the very least. So the widowed Mrs. Nickleby is something of a standout. In her nonstop nattering, her ricocheting segues, her boundless blather Dickens has created a wonderfully comic character.
Mrs. Nickelby is saved from the taint of towering egotism by her good heart, her being totally clueless, and her devotion to her children (who protect her from the perils they actually face). Mrs. Nickleby is a completely conventional matron who cannot think ill of anyone, even the vilest villain in the novel. She may be silly, but she enlivens every page on which she appears. I love this book. Dickens’ irrepressible narrative energy is everywhere abundant, splashing like a fountain; the scenes and prose are vivid and visceral. Nicholas Nickleby does not have the gravity or ambition of the later works, but it the best of the early books.
Lucia Santa in Mario Puzo’s THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM
This was Puzo’s first novel, and his lifelong favorite. It is a story based on his mother, and a vivid tale of immigrant life in New York in the Twenties. Lucia Santa has had two husbands, both disappointments (put kindly) and both gone. She struggles to keep her family together, to keep her dignity intact, to insist on respect. Many of the children are young adults with their own wishes, whims and ideas, but Lucia prevails. In my opinion she is a more vivid character than Don Corleone.
RWB Book Club: Mothers in Fiction
Additionally we have an informal book club that meets the second Sunday of each month in the lobby of Pickford Cinema at 4 also to drink wine, eat snacks and talk about the books we have loved organized around a monthly theme. Again, no dues save to contribute toward the wine. You can see what’s important here.
For our May the RWB Book Club theme was, not surprisingly, Mothers. This turned out to be more difficult than many of us imagined. In our discussion last Sunday, of course Mommy Dearest made an appearance among other titles where the mother was a force for destruction. As a group we marveled at the paucity of novels with good mothers. Indeed, the more we talked, we noted that if the mothers in memorable books or novels were not nasty unto evil, then often they were comic or symbolic. One reader was so completely daunted, she chose books like Jane Eyre where girls who were motherless made their way in the world as successful, if challenged adults. The only strong, positive mother I could think of was Lucia Santa from The Fortunate Pilgrim, Mario Puzo’s first novel. There’s the mother in Little Women, a model of loving decorum, but face it, boring. One reader brought the children’s book, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree in which the maternal tree yields up its everything to and for the demanding child. Is that the good mother? I hope not since the tree finally expired.
Thoughts, readers? Where are the good mothers in fiction?
Here were my choices for the RWB Book Club theme of Mothers
Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Ma Joad is a rough-hewn Madonna, without the Madonna’s grace or good looks, but full of her enduring strength in the face of tragedy. As the uprooted, impoverished Joads make their way west to California, Ma is their guiding spirit and driving force, even if she’s not behind the wheel. She gives the clan courage to forbear against the poverty, contempt and hard times. California turns out not to be the Golden State for the Joads and people like them.
If Ma Joad is like the Madonna, she is also like the Buddha, unmoving; she does not grow or change. Other than enduring, she is not a textured character. Steinbeck, for all his writerly gifts, could not write women. Women in his novels are either totally sexless pillars of strength and wisdom (Ma Joad) or jezebel harlots, who use sex as a weapon (Cathy in East of Eden), or possibly tender, cheerful whores like the girls in Sweet Thursday. That said, The Grapes of Wrath as a whole circles round the maternal principle, beginning to end. Who can forget that final scene when a young mother (Ma’s daughter) has just given birth to a dead child, and yet she offers her breast to suckle a starving man.
Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The opening scene of The Scarlet Letter is probably permanently imprinted on the minds of everyone who had to read it in high school: Hester Prynne, her “A” glittering in the New England sunlight, strides toward the site of her public degradation, squalling proof of her sin borne proudly in her arms. Sin, rather than motherhood, fascinated Hawthorne. Sex as the Original Sin forever warped the lives of women destined to bear unwanted out-of-wedlock children. Hester Prynne, however, is no cringing, knocked up girl; from the beginning, she is a woman, her wild heart finding solace in the wild forest; her innate dignity allows her to endure the town’s contempt. Contempt, as the novel progresses, tinged with mystery, even admiration.
Hester is the original American Single Mother. (Her child, the impish Pearl, is one of the strangest children in American literature.) Unlike Ma Joad, whom one cannot imagine either in the throes of passion, or the throes of childbirth, Hester’s having borne a child testifies to sex as well as sin. Beneath her puritan grays, and her scarlet letter, and despite Hawthorne’s often tortured prose, the reader always feels that a real woman’s heart beats in Hester’s breast. Why else has she been ongoingly interesting for over a 150 years?
Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
At the opposite end of the suffering spectrum is the delightful minor character, Mrs. Nickleby. She is mother to Kate and Nicholas, the eponymous hero of Dickens’ third novel. Mothers don’t usually fare well in Dickens’ work, or even appear. His main characters are mostly orphaned or abandoned, motherless at the very least. So the widowed Mrs. Nickleby is something of a standout. In her nonstop nattering, her ricocheting segues, her boundless blather Dickens has created a wonderfully comic character.
Mrs. Nickelby is saved from the taint of towering egotism by her good heart, her being totally clueless, and her devotion to her children (who protect her from the perils they actually face). Mrs. Nickleby is a completely conventional matron who cannot think ill of anyone, even the vilest villain in the novel. She may be silly, but she enlivens every page on which she appears. I love this book. Dickens’ irrepressible narrative energy is everywhere abundant, splashing like a fountain; the scenes and prose are vivid and visceral. Nicholas Nickleby does not have the gravity or ambition of the later works, but it the best of the early books.
Lucia Santa in Mario Puzo’s THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM
This was Puzo’s first novel, and his lifelong favorite. It is a story based on his mother, and a vivid tale of immigrant life in New York in the Twenties. Lucia Santa has had two husbands, both disappointments (put kindly) and both gone. She struggles to keep her family together, to keep her dignity intact, to insist on respect. Many of the children are young adults with their own wishes, whims and ideas, but Lucia prevails. In my opinion she is a more vivid character than Don Corleone.
RWB Book Club: Mothers in Fiction
Additionally we have an informal book club that meets the second Sunday of each month in the lobby of Pickford Cinema at 4 also to drink wine, eat snacks and talk about the books we have loved organized around a monthly theme. Again, no dues save to contribute toward the wine. You can see what’s important here.
For our May the RWB Book Club theme was, not surprisingly, Mothers. This turned out to be more difficult than many of us imagined. In our discussion last Sunday, of course Mommy Dearest made an appearance among other titles where the mother was a force for destruction. As a group we marveled at the paucity of novels with good mothers. Indeed, the more we talked, we noted that if the mothers in memorable books or novels were not nasty unto evil, then often they were comic or symbolic. One reader was so completely daunted, she chose books like Jane Eyre where girls who were motherless made their way in the world as successful, if challenged adults. The only strong, positive mother I could think of was Lucia Santa from The Fortunate Pilgrim, Mario Puzo’s first novel. There’s the mother in Little Women, a model of loving decorum, but face it, boring. One reader brought the children’s book, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree in which the maternal tree yields up its everything to and for the demanding child. Is that the good mother? I hope not since the tree finally expired.
Thoughts, readers? Where are the good mothers in fiction?
Here were my choices for the RWB Book Club theme of Mothers
Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Ma Joad is a rough-hewn Madonna, without the Madonna’s grace or good looks, but full of her enduring strength in the face of tragedy. As the uprooted, impoverished Joads make their way west to California, Ma is their guiding spirit and driving force, even if she’s not behind the wheel. She gives the clan courage to forbear against the poverty, contempt and hard times. California turns out not to be the Golden State for the Joads and people like them.
If Ma Joad is like the Madonna, she is also like the Buddha, unmoving; she does not grow or change. Other than enduring, she is not a textured character. Steinbeck, for all his writerly gifts, could not write women. Women in his novels are either totally sexless pillars of strength and wisdom (Ma Joad) or jezebel harlots, who use sex as a weapon (Cathy in East of Eden), or possibly tender, cheerful whores like the girls in Sweet Thursday. That said, The Grapes of Wrath as a whole circles round the maternal principle, beginning to end. Who can forget that final scene when a young mother (Ma’s daughter) has just given birth to a dead child, and yet she offers her breast to suckle a starving man.
Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The opening scene of The Scarlet Letter is probably permanently imprinted on the minds of everyone who had to read it in high school: Hester Prynne, her “A” glittering in the New England sunlight, strides toward the site of her public degradation, squalling proof of her sin borne proudly in her arms. Sin, rather than motherhood, fascinated Hawthorne. Sex as the Original Sin forever warped the lives of women destined to bear unwanted out-of-wedlock children. Hester Prynne, however, is no cringing, knocked up girl; from the beginning, she is a woman, her wild heart finding solace in the wild forest; her innate dignity allows her to endure the town’s contempt. Contempt, as the novel progresses, tinged with mystery, even admiration.
Hester is the original American Single Mother. (Her child, the impish Pearl, is one of the strangest children in American literature.) Unlike Ma Joad, whom one cannot imagine either in the throes of passion, or the throes of childbirth, Hester’s having borne a child testifies to sex as well as sin. Beneath her puritan grays, and her scarlet letter, and despite Hawthorne’s often tortured prose, the reader always feels that a real woman’s heart beats in Hester’s breast. Why else has she been ongoingly interesting for over a 150 years?
Mrs. Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
At the opposite end of the suffering spectrum is the delightful minor character, Mrs. Nickleby. She is mother to Kate and Nicholas, the eponymous hero of Dickens’ third novel. Mothers don’t usually fare well in Dickens’ work, or even appear. His main characters are mostly orphaned or abandoned, motherless at the very least. So the widowed Mrs. Nickleby is something of a standout. In her nonstop nattering, her ricocheting segues, her boundless blather Dickens has created a wonderfully comic character.
Mrs. Nickelby is saved from the taint of towering egotism by her good heart, her being totally clueless, and her devotion to her children (who protect her from the perils they actually face). Mrs. Nickleby is a completely conventional matron who cannot think ill of anyone, even the vilest villain in the novel. She may be silly, but she enlivens every page on which she appears. I love this book. Dickens’ irrepressible narrative energy is everywhere abundant, splashing like a fountain; the scenes and prose are vivid and visceral. Nicholas Nickleby does not have the gravity or ambition of the later works, but it the best of the early books.
Lucia Santa in Mario Puzo’s THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM
This was Puzo’s first novel, and his lifelong favorite. It is a story based on his mother, and a vivid tale of immigrant life in New York in the Twenties. Lucia Santa has had two husbands, both disappointments (put kindly) and both gone. She struggles to keep her family together, to keep her dignity intact, to insist on respect. Many of the children are young adults with their own wishes, whims and ideas, but Lucia prevails. In my opinion she is a more vivid character than Don Corleone.
