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MEGO Ledes
This is page one from a book which shall remain nameless, lent me to cheer me up by someone who shall remain nameless, by a perennial National Book Award finalist and some time best seller:
Wardsbury, Grayshead-on-Heath, England,
1914-1918
Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far. Mum said she had no choice. Besides, she said, starving made the world brighter, took away the dull edges, the disappointment. She said this in hospital, the place not entirely unpleasant -- a private room, windows ammonia-washed looking out to a tree branch on windless days, an ivy-covered wall.
For instance, those, she said. Someone had sent greenhouse lilies, suffrage white, to their favorite cause celebre, lilies now stuffed in a hospital pot intended for urine or bile. She said she had never known them to have that smell. She'd been blessed by this, she said, the smell of lilies. She said this when she was still speaking, or when she could still be heard, before she twisted into a shape reserved for cracked sticks and hard as that, before thety gave her the drip intended for dying soldiers and here, said the attendant, wasted on a woman by her own hand. Then I was afraid I might break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word. Before I had tried and tried. Then I gave up like Mum did and went quiet.
Grandmother said to her, "You're too smart." She sat in the chair knitting, like Madame Lafarge waiting for heads to drop....She had the attendant bring in the blue-veined china soup tureen....
Herewith, I bite the hand that feeds me.
Where do I begin? How about with the word Mum, which corroborates the bodice-ripping dateline? Mum is what all British people call their mothers, yes? Uh, no. Lower middle-class British people call their mothers Mum. Small bereaved princes call their mothers Mummy. Many British people not of the working classes call their mothers Mother, as do many country people, who are interestingly formal, like in the highlands and the islands. Mum is kind of Cockney, not to say chav. So this is going to be a book about chavs, yes?
No. Mum is a dying suffragist of the upper middle class being written about by an American with just about the most tin ear I've encountered. She writes as if talking out of the side of her mouth, with the most shocking coarseness, while also getting these status marker insider terms she slavishly adores -- in hospital -- almost completely wrong. If you're going to be a social climber, dude, you've got to get the syntax right. Nothing makes my lizard lids droop and flicker more dangerously than somebody who is hoping to pass who gets the accent wrong. The author does this throughout the book, anachronisms and malaprops so coarse and strident in settings so upper crust -- You're too smart -- in British means, you're too well-dressed, which is something not even Madame Lafarge would say to somebody on their death bed -- that it stops being a tic and starts being Tourettes'. You're too smart is also not a locution, I should think, being used even in America in 1914 -- but enough. And, oh, Madame Lafarge? One of the most famous and emblematic characters in Dickens, who stands at the top of the canon of British literature? Her name is Defarge.
Starving made the world brighter makes it clear what this novel of five generations of women is going to be about, aside from the permutations of Babbitry, country club mannerisms, of which anorexia is, of course, a late 20th century requirement. What starving meant to the suffragists, demeaningly referred to on the jacket cover as "suffragettes", is of course the cynosure of much seven sisters scholarship. I gently submit that what it meant to the British suffragists had nothing to do with the perfectionism and delusional highs of anorexia, and that it came rather from an entirely different, and political, and masculinist, tradition.
Having cleverly established the tone, location, class, venue and action in one sentence, it is now time for some purty writin': ....windows ammonia-washed looking out to a tree branch on windless days, an ivy-covered wall. This existential, or Zen visual metaphor, is almost perfectly rendered for a 1957 Jules Feiffer cartoon. It is a cartoon, it is 1957, nothing wrong with that. Except that this is 1914 and you're trying -- and failing like a motherfucker -- to make it not cartoonish. You've blown the British class and accent thing, you've betrayed your hidden agenda as anorexia, and with your metaphor you nail explicitly your almost total cluelessness about what you're expressing. The Jules Feiffer black turtleneck side-of-the-mouth Zen hipster thing is a great voice, a Holden Caulfield voice, an Allen Ginsberg voice among others, yet it is dated, it is anachronistic for this 1914 British suffrage deathbed scene in about a thousand ways, and to allude to Washington Square bohemia of the 1950s with the windless Camus branch reveals your true origins -- as do all the other whoppers in the book. If you are channeling Woody Allen, do not write this book.
Then there's the lurching into tough-guy mode problem -- the smells. The ammonia-washed window. The lilies in the piss pot, very Zen. And they smell like lilies, not piss! Hahahahahaha! Good joke! You're telling jokes, right? Or are you channeling Hemingway describing a World War One soldier's anomie? Hemingway? You need a good ear for accents to do Hemingway, and Hemingway was actually a pretty good writer on the subject of death. He, like, felt it, which is why he streamlined the syntax. Are you with me? So you're doing stiff upper lip, side-of-the-mouth, and damaged Nietzschean doughboy all at once? With the weird 1957 vibe?
I could go on. The soup tureen as a marker of class. Virginia Woolf makes a soup tureen the very vortex of modernity in To the Lighthouse -- Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy.... -- so it can be made to portend. But I will desist.
Because.
My. eyes. glaze. over.
1914-1918
Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far. Mum said she had no choice. Besides, she said, starving made the world brighter, took away the dull edges, the disappointment. She said this in hospital, the place not entirely unpleasant -- a private room, windows ammonia-washed looking out to a tree branch on windless days, an ivy-covered wall.
For instance, those, she said. Someone had sent greenhouse lilies, suffrage white, to their favorite cause celebre, lilies now stuffed in a hospital pot intended for urine or bile. She said she had never known them to have that smell. She'd been blessed by this, she said, the smell of lilies. She said this when she was still speaking, or when she could still be heard, before she twisted into a shape reserved for cracked sticks and hard as that, before thety gave her the drip intended for dying soldiers and here, said the attendant, wasted on a woman by her own hand. Then I was afraid I might break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word. Before I had tried and tried. Then I gave up like Mum did and went quiet.
Grandmother said to her, "You're too smart." She sat in the chair knitting, like Madame Lafarge waiting for heads to drop....She had the attendant bring in the blue-veined china soup tureen....
Herewith, I bite the hand that feeds me.
Where do I begin? How about with the word Mum, which corroborates the bodice-ripping dateline? Mum is what all British people call their mothers, yes? Uh, no. Lower middle-class British people call their mothers Mum. Small bereaved princes call their mothers Mummy. Many British people not of the working classes call their mothers Mother, as do many country people, who are interestingly formal, like in the highlands and the islands. Mum is kind of Cockney, not to say chav. So this is going to be a book about chavs, yes?
No. Mum is a dying suffragist of the upper middle class being written about by an American with just about the most tin ear I've encountered. She writes as if talking out of the side of her mouth, with the most shocking coarseness, while also getting these status marker insider terms she slavishly adores -- in hospital -- almost completely wrong. If you're going to be a social climber, dude, you've got to get the syntax right. Nothing makes my lizard lids droop and flicker more dangerously than somebody who is hoping to pass who gets the accent wrong. The author does this throughout the book, anachronisms and malaprops so coarse and strident in settings so upper crust -- You're too smart -- in British means, you're too well-dressed, which is something not even Madame Lafarge would say to somebody on their death bed -- that it stops being a tic and starts being Tourettes'. You're too smart is also not a locution, I should think, being used even in America in 1914 -- but enough. And, oh, Madame Lafarge? One of the most famous and emblematic characters in Dickens, who stands at the top of the canon of British literature? Her name is Defarge.
Starving made the world brighter makes it clear what this novel of five generations of women is going to be about, aside from the permutations of Babbitry, country club mannerisms, of which anorexia is, of course, a late 20th century requirement. What starving meant to the suffragists, demeaningly referred to on the jacket cover as "suffragettes", is of course the cynosure of much seven sisters scholarship. I gently submit that what it meant to the British suffragists had nothing to do with the perfectionism and delusional highs of anorexia, and that it came rather from an entirely different, and political, and masculinist, tradition.
Having cleverly established the tone, location, class, venue and action in one sentence, it is now time for some purty writin': ....windows ammonia-washed looking out to a tree branch on windless days, an ivy-covered wall. This existential, or Zen visual metaphor, is almost perfectly rendered for a 1957 Jules Feiffer cartoon. It is a cartoon, it is 1957, nothing wrong with that. Except that this is 1914 and you're trying -- and failing like a motherfucker -- to make it not cartoonish. You've blown the British class and accent thing, you've betrayed your hidden agenda as anorexia, and with your metaphor you nail explicitly your almost total cluelessness about what you're expressing. The Jules Feiffer black turtleneck side-of-the-mouth Zen hipster thing is a great voice, a Holden Caulfield voice, an Allen Ginsberg voice among others, yet it is dated, it is anachronistic for this 1914 British suffrage deathbed scene in about a thousand ways, and to allude to Washington Square bohemia of the 1950s with the windless Camus branch reveals your true origins -- as do all the other whoppers in the book. If you are channeling Woody Allen, do not write this book.
Then there's the lurching into tough-guy mode problem -- the smells. The ammonia-washed window. The lilies in the piss pot, very Zen. And they smell like lilies, not piss! Hahahahahaha! Good joke! You're telling jokes, right? Or are you channeling Hemingway describing a World War One soldier's anomie? Hemingway? You need a good ear for accents to do Hemingway, and Hemingway was actually a pretty good writer on the subject of death. He, like, felt it, which is why he streamlined the syntax. Are you with me? So you're doing stiff upper lip, side-of-the-mouth, and damaged Nietzschean doughboy all at once? With the weird 1957 vibe?
I could go on. The soup tureen as a marker of class. Virginia Woolf makes a soup tureen the very vortex of modernity in To the Lighthouse -- Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy.... -- so it can be made to portend. But I will desist.
Because.
My. eyes. glaze. over.
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actually i did go on reading for an hour. and then inspected the rest of it. just to make sure.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0126/Veronica-Egan-and-the-Great-Old-Broads-keep-vigil-over-endangered-wild-lands
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I can find it in the Titusville, Pennsylvania Morning Herald of January 6, 1885.
A young man, who, with a few of his friends, were having a bit of quiet fun and had evidently enjoyed themselves, said: "I'll bet cigars for the crowd that I'll stop the car without ringing the bell, speaking to the driver or conductor or asking anyone to stop it."
"Oh. you'll go outside and slap hold of the brake. You're too smart, you are," remarked one of his companions, smilingly. "You'll cut yourself if you don't mind".
"No, siree, I'll do no such thing. I'll neither touch the brake nor ask anyone to touch it for me. And I won't ask anybody to stop the car."
The bet was taken.
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It also kind of encapsulates why I hate historical novels. They're always fake. If you weren't there you'll never, ever get the accent of the times right, no matter how much source material you have. I cringe trying to imagine how people in 100 years are going to write about these days.
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