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rushthatspeaksWhen I walk into a new library, where I have not been before, usually I go to the card catalog and poke around a little, to see if it is a good and thorough library, or at least one with unexpected erudite corners. There are a handful of authors and works I use for this, because only good libraries have them: Lucy Boston's adult work, Sylvia Townsend Warner's letters, the correct three novels by Elizabeth Goudge. (All the books that make me happy that I can't afford: Goudge's Valley of Song starts at fifty on abebooks and only goes up.)
And of course Naomi Mitchison. Who wrote so many books, of which so few are findable; just about everywhere has The Corn King and the Spring Queen, and Small Beer very kindly recently reprinted Travel Light, but we are speaking here of a writer whose first book was published in 1923 and whose last in 1998, whose full bibliography is more than ninety titles. Of which, given my general lack of finance, I have despite inveterate library and used-bookstore scrounging managed to read-- not own but read-- five, counting the one tonight. It is intolerable, because every single one I have read has been a treasure. The library in town here has no Mitchison at all, but the university library has, bless them, three, so I've two more to look forward to. Therefore it is down in my books as a good library and nothing can change that.
Now the thing about Mitchison is that she is, somehow, beyond or outside of time. I don't know how. The Delicate Fire was first published in 1933, and there are precisely two other books it reminds me of, in tone and in nature, and they are Ursula Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) and Laurie Marks' Fire Logic (2003). Mitchison has that nature to her, where she reads as though she were, even now, writing this very minute, or tomorrow.
This is not one of the things she did in fantasy or science fiction directions; it is a collection of historical short stories and poetry. The poetry is sadly mostly negligible, although there are a few turns of phrase that make me blink and look at it again, and the couple of things that are narrative and poetry both are amazing. The fiction is arranged chronologically according to when it is set, beginning in ancient Greece and moving through the Vikings.
The title piece is a delicate novella set in Mytilene, on Lesbos, during a summer one young girl spends there before being married; and we gradually realize that this girl's mother had a history with the poet, Sappho, when they were girls together. It's a piece that works by indirection and physical detail and then hits you with the poetry right between the eyes, with the specific moments that must have gone into the poetry, figs and orchards and ocean and wedding songs and mud.
But the center of the book, the interlinked stories that together make a novel (it is novel-length) follow several people who were citizens of the city of Mantinea, when it was sacked, and the men were sold north to Macedonia and the women sold to the Macedonian settlers of the town. The couple at the center of it, Aglaos and Kleta, are fairly newly married, deeply in love, and it is a hard parting: they vow, of course, to return to one another, with their child, and Kleta's brother, and remake their family. But there is a lot of blood and time and pain and ocean in the way of that.
This ought to be depressing, and it ought to be unbelievable, and it is neither; both kindness and cruelty are sufficiently unexpected. It is Kleta I am most amazed by, because even nowadays people do not write women this way, Kleta who will do what she has to do and bear the children she has to bear and find, somewhere, the kind of strength no one ever really recognizes but herself, but she knows her own power. Kleta is so amazing, I cannot get over it. Certainly you can see Mitchison's politics in this work, if you are looking for them, certainly you can say it's not gritty enough or too gritty or anything like that, but for me it walks a perfect transcendent line between real pain and real grace. There is a moment here where two people fall in love, and it was both precisely the best possible thing and precisely the worst possible thing for both of them, at the same time, and writers are always trying to do that in fiction, but I think this may be the best I've seen it done.
Ah hell, this is Naomi Mitchison, I don't know why I'm trying to review her, that writer I am so glad I came to as an adult because if I had met her as a child I would have tried to write like her instead of like myself. There are books and writers who are good and great, and then there are the ones who are enduring comfort, enduring certainty that fiction can do what one always wants it to, the things it almost never does do. I cannot make her sound as truly new and different and quietly explosive as she is. I only hope that someday the rest of us can catch up to some of the things that she did in the thirties.
Fragment from a Phaedra
Phaedra: So what I said was, Theseus, after all
this is what it comes to,
-- and I leant my cheek against the wall,
looking out
on the sea of Athens, hard and savage blue--
Why must you begin to doubt
that I love you also, always?
(As I do)
Would I tell you if I did not trust you?
He began to pull the fringes of my shawl:
Yes, I doubt you.
Oh my God, Phaedra, you hurt me, must you?
Women's hearts have room for only one,
never two.
Must I learn to live without you?
You.
Mother of my children-- oh!
So I shook my head and answered
No.
Stupid, dear Achaean!
Ariadne: Phaedra, Phaedra, will you never learn,
smallest, dearest sister?
We are far from Crete, from Father, no return:
you from Athens, I from Naxos.
We are Queens
over our dear Northern bullies with their blue and startled eyes.
And it means
we must quite forget the dancing and the laughter and the talk,
and the understanding of our hearts that leap and ache
snatching at the hour that flies.
In Achaea we must walk
coldly on our hill tops, set apart, and take
worship of our men, and like the Gods,
give them lies.
Phaedra: Yet why need I, yet why should I?
Who can bind
Love to one small service only?--
Love the giver, ever kind.
Where our mother failed to, dare I, could I?
My love's plain where hers was strange and misted,
there is nothing evil, nothing twisted,
only one in two:
Theseus as he is, my children's father,
wise and trusted, kind and true,
and the other--
Theseus as he was before I met him,
when you knew him, sister, when you let him
kill our queer bull-brother.
Well.
There's Hippolytos: like that. You do remember!
Why not tell?
And of course Naomi Mitchison. Who wrote so many books, of which so few are findable; just about everywhere has The Corn King and the Spring Queen, and Small Beer very kindly recently reprinted Travel Light, but we are speaking here of a writer whose first book was published in 1923 and whose last in 1998, whose full bibliography is more than ninety titles. Of which, given my general lack of finance, I have despite inveterate library and used-bookstore scrounging managed to read-- not own but read-- five, counting the one tonight. It is intolerable, because every single one I have read has been a treasure. The library in town here has no Mitchison at all, but the university library has, bless them, three, so I've two more to look forward to. Therefore it is down in my books as a good library and nothing can change that.
Now the thing about Mitchison is that she is, somehow, beyond or outside of time. I don't know how. The Delicate Fire was first published in 1933, and there are precisely two other books it reminds me of, in tone and in nature, and they are Ursula Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) and Laurie Marks' Fire Logic (2003). Mitchison has that nature to her, where she reads as though she were, even now, writing this very minute, or tomorrow.
This is not one of the things she did in fantasy or science fiction directions; it is a collection of historical short stories and poetry. The poetry is sadly mostly negligible, although there are a few turns of phrase that make me blink and look at it again, and the couple of things that are narrative and poetry both are amazing. The fiction is arranged chronologically according to when it is set, beginning in ancient Greece and moving through the Vikings.
The title piece is a delicate novella set in Mytilene, on Lesbos, during a summer one young girl spends there before being married; and we gradually realize that this girl's mother had a history with the poet, Sappho, when they were girls together. It's a piece that works by indirection and physical detail and then hits you with the poetry right between the eyes, with the specific moments that must have gone into the poetry, figs and orchards and ocean and wedding songs and mud.
But the center of the book, the interlinked stories that together make a novel (it is novel-length) follow several people who were citizens of the city of Mantinea, when it was sacked, and the men were sold north to Macedonia and the women sold to the Macedonian settlers of the town. The couple at the center of it, Aglaos and Kleta, are fairly newly married, deeply in love, and it is a hard parting: they vow, of course, to return to one another, with their child, and Kleta's brother, and remake their family. But there is a lot of blood and time and pain and ocean in the way of that.
This ought to be depressing, and it ought to be unbelievable, and it is neither; both kindness and cruelty are sufficiently unexpected. It is Kleta I am most amazed by, because even nowadays people do not write women this way, Kleta who will do what she has to do and bear the children she has to bear and find, somewhere, the kind of strength no one ever really recognizes but herself, but she knows her own power. Kleta is so amazing, I cannot get over it. Certainly you can see Mitchison's politics in this work, if you are looking for them, certainly you can say it's not gritty enough or too gritty or anything like that, but for me it walks a perfect transcendent line between real pain and real grace. There is a moment here where two people fall in love, and it was both precisely the best possible thing and precisely the worst possible thing for both of them, at the same time, and writers are always trying to do that in fiction, but I think this may be the best I've seen it done.
Ah hell, this is Naomi Mitchison, I don't know why I'm trying to review her, that writer I am so glad I came to as an adult because if I had met her as a child I would have tried to write like her instead of like myself. There are books and writers who are good and great, and then there are the ones who are enduring comfort, enduring certainty that fiction can do what one always wants it to, the things it almost never does do. I cannot make her sound as truly new and different and quietly explosive as she is. I only hope that someday the rest of us can catch up to some of the things that she did in the thirties.
Fragment from a Phaedra
Phaedra: So what I said was, Theseus, after all
this is what it comes to,
-- and I leant my cheek against the wall,
looking out
on the sea of Athens, hard and savage blue--
Why must you begin to doubt
that I love you also, always?
(As I do)
Would I tell you if I did not trust you?
He began to pull the fringes of my shawl:
Yes, I doubt you.
Oh my God, Phaedra, you hurt me, must you?
Women's hearts have room for only one,
never two.
Must I learn to live without you?
You.
Mother of my children-- oh!
So I shook my head and answered
No.
Stupid, dear Achaean!
Ariadne: Phaedra, Phaedra, will you never learn,
smallest, dearest sister?
We are far from Crete, from Father, no return:
you from Athens, I from Naxos.
We are Queens
over our dear Northern bullies with their blue and startled eyes.
And it means
we must quite forget the dancing and the laughter and the talk,
and the understanding of our hearts that leap and ache
snatching at the hour that flies.
In Achaea we must walk
coldly on our hill tops, set apart, and take
worship of our men, and like the Gods,
give them lies.
Phaedra: Yet why need I, yet why should I?
Who can bind
Love to one small service only?--
Love the giver, ever kind.
Where our mother failed to, dare I, could I?
My love's plain where hers was strange and misted,
there is nothing evil, nothing twisted,
only one in two:
Theseus as he is, my children's father,
wise and trusted, kind and true,
and the other--
Theseus as he was before I met him,
when you knew him, sister, when you let him
kill our queer bull-brother.
Well.
There's Hippolytos: like that. You do remember!
Why not tell?
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 02:31 pm (UTC)For years I have been reading her books by the method of chancing upon them at used-book sales and libraries, which means I have read five or six, apart from The Little White Horse, which I read every year as a child. I think buying them all online would take some of the magic away. (I didn't even realize they were so expensive!)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 08:34 am (UTC)I haven't been able to get through any of her adult books so far, but my girlfriend tells me I ought to try the trilogy beginning with The Dean's Watch.
Buying them all online would indeed take some of the magic away, but I may resort to it with Valley of Song because it is never ever going to turn up in a bookstore. Someone whose unknown name I curse stole it from the library I first read it in; if I had known they were going to do that I would have swiped it myself preemptively, my usual ethics be damned.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 02:16 pm (UTC)I think my favorite of her adult books I've so far read is Gentian Hill.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 08:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 09:26 am (UTC)Nine
no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 11:37 am (UTC)whoa. my reading queue just got much longer. there appear to be more than 50 titles accessible to me from my local libraries.
thanks.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 08:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 05:02 pm (UTC)I don't know about the third, but I'd put The Valley of Song (1951) and Linnets and Valerians (1964) at the very top of the list. The Little White Horse (1946) is the famous one. I also remember being fond of The Dean's Watch (1960) and the trilogy it belongs to, but I haven't re-read them in years.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-16 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 05:27 pm (UTC)You're welcome. The Valley of Song is my favorite of her novels and for my money the best thing she ever wrote, but it is also nearly impossible to find; I used to read the copy in the Cambridge Public Library, and then someone who wasn't me stole it.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 08:25 am (UTC)λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν
Date: 2011-03-16 05:07 pm (UTC). . . you are telling me someone fic'd Sappho 31?
I must find this.
(I mean, the rest sounds good, too, but good grief.)
Re: λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν
Date: 2011-03-17 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 04:09 pm (UTC)WANT.
Librarian chimes in with book-access ideas.
Date: 2011-03-17 01:27 am (UTC)1. Acquire titles and basic information from WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ANaomi+Mitchison&fq=ln%3Aeng&qt=advanced&dblist=638)
2. Make an interlibrary loan request through the public library (may involve a small fee) or through the university library (probably no fee if the request is made by a faculty member.)
3. Wait.
4. Profit.
Also, I see that the Boston Public Library system has 26 titles - most are noncirculating, which won't help for ILL but might if you happen to have a free afternoon near the main library there.
Re: Librarian chimes in with book-access ideas.
Date: 2011-03-17 08:27 am (UTC)Re: Librarian chimes in with book-access ideas.
Date: 2011-03-17 02:33 pm (UTC)Re: Librarian chimes in with book-access ideas.
Date: 2011-03-17 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 03:42 am (UTC)I do have a copy of To the Chapel Perilous.
P.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 08:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-17 05:30 pm (UTC)If I can excavate my copy from the correct box (insert despairing and Sartrean laughter), you can read it when you come here in April.