The Radium Girls

When it was discovered that radium could be used to treat cancerous tumours, entrepreneurs quickly seized the opportunity to promote it in a wide range of products: soap, pills, dressings, suppositories, toothpaste, cosmetics, jockstraps.

One of the most widespread uses of radium was in luminous dials for watches. Dial-painting was performed by women, often teenagers as young as 14. They used a technique called lip-pointing, which involved shaping the tip of a paintbrush with their mouths. They also prepared the radium-infused paint they used by mixing a powder with water. The powder was very fine and was got everywhere. On their clothes, in their hair. Their employer, Radium Dial, assured them the paint was perfectly harmless. It even claimed radium was good for them.

Radium poisoning can take years to manifest. With the dial painters one of the first symptoms was often teeth that became loose and fell out. The wounds they left refused to heal and oozed pus. Sometimes a jawbone crumbled. Dentists were perplexed.

Other dial-painters developed sarcomas. One woman's head swelled to twice its size. Another had a leg that became four inches shorter than the other. A third fainted from fright when she woke up in the middle of the night and saw herself in the mirror. She had not turned on the lights. Her face was glowing.

Radium Dial steadfastly maintained that the problems were not work-related, but knew the truth as early as 1925 and did everything in its power to cover up and evade blame. This mainly involved lying, but sometimes included dirty tricks. When the company agreed to have an autopsy performed on a recently deceased woman, her family asked that their own doctor be present. The company agreed, but arranged to have the autopsy performed before the doctor arrived. Diphtheria was given as the cause of death.

Many doctors happily allowed their patients to rack up enormous bills. Some were merely incompetent, others in the employ of the company were downright crooked. Part of the problem was that the dangers of radium poisoning were not well-known. That changed when a wealthy playboy named Eben Myers died in 1932 after drinking several thousand bottle of "radium water." A newspaper headline said, "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off."

The afflicted women finally found a lawyer who agreed to take their case to court. Leonard Grossman was recommended by Clarence Darrow, and had a soft spot for the working class. For him, the cause was more important than the fee. He won the case, but the decision was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. The company involved used the statute of limitations to fight off paying financial damages..

The bulk of the book is taken up with the personal stories of the dial-painters and the terrible suffering they endured. It's a heart-rending account, one you will not easily forget.

Children in Reindeer Woods

A few years ago my wife visited Iceland and returned with a stack of books. One of them, Bloodhoof, a collection of poems in both Icelandic and English, she took a stab at translating herself with the help of a dictionary.

This is the first one I've dipped into it, and it's quite unlike anything I've ever read, It's a modern fairytale that takes place at a summer camp called Children in Reindeer Woods, and is linked by road to the Ceaseless Heath, the Endless Pass, and the Forever Valley.

The heroine is an 11-year-old girl named Billie. Her father believes he is a puppet. Whenever his arm is torn off, Billie's mother sews it back on. 

Billie has several dolls. One is named Guggalugga, another is bald, and a third is pregnant.

The man in charge of the camp is a former ballet dancer with splayed feet.

Somewhere in the Distance a War is Going on.

The story begins with the arrival of a soldier named Rafael. He wants to be a farmer and gets rid of his uniform but not his weapons.

Another soldier arrives. He parachutes in with a guitar. 

A pair of tax collectors show up with a briefcase full of money in the trunk of their car.

A nun comes to the back door and asks for food, then a cigarette. Rafael offers her a drink. She takes off her clothes, plays the guitar, and kisses Raphael.

The last visitor is a shepherd who has been tending a flock of sheep all summer. He plans on returning to university.

Except for Rafael, none of them stay around for any longer than a night. When he and Billie have an argument, they call each other idiot-head and pretzel-face.

Eyes of a Child

There are brief moments of violence but they are not gruesome, and some are absurd. Two dolls commit suicide. Raphael hangs a chicken for crapping in the house, and blows up two cars.

Many of the scenes are described with a childlike innocence.

The cow lowed from out back as though it was missing the fun. Mooooo.

[Billie] dried her mouth as if it were a stamp and the napkin an important document.

The automobile set off from the place.  Fart Fart.

When Rafael and Billie decide to get married, the dolls are witnesses. "We'll let the hens sign the contract," says Billie.

The final chapter caps the surreal nature of the book. It takes place on the planet of the puppeteers who control Billie's father. 

Author

Kristen Omarsdottir is an Icelandic author, poet, playwright, and visual artist. She has written other novels but this is the only one that has been translated into English. The translation is by Lytton Smith.

Titanic Survivor

The author was a stewardess who not only survived the sinking of the Titanic, but also that of its sister ship, the Britannic.

As dranatic as these events are, they form only a minor part in the life by a remarkable woman. Violet Jessop was born in Buenos Aires to Irish parents, spoke Spanish, had a pet armadillo, and lost part of a lung due to TB during her early years in Argentina. Her brothers and sisters suffered numerous illnesses, some of which were fatal: scarlet fever, diphtheria, meningitis, smallpox, rheumatic fever, and malaria.

She was 16 when her father died. Her mother moved the family to England, and went to work as a stewardess on a steamship line. Eventually Violet followed, and thus began a 42-year career at sea, during which she became the family breadwinner. She worked for several lines -- the White Star, the Red Star, and the Royal Mail -- and saw a good deal of the world. 

Titanic

Three chapters are devoted to her experiences on the Titanic. She has kind words for Thomas Andrews, "beloved designer" of the ship because of the consideration he showed for the crew in his plans.

Violet was in lifeboat 18. As she was boarding it, a baby was thrust into arms, and later once she was aboard the ship that rescued survivors, the Carpathia, a woman snatched the baby away from her without a word. In an epilogue we learn that just before she died, she received a mysterious phone call from a person who claimed to be that child.

Britannic

Four-and-a-half years later, during WWI she signed up as a nurse, and eventually found herself on the Britannic. It was being used as a hospital ship when it hit a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea. The captain kept her under way after the explosion, trying to make for shallower water, without realizing that the propellers were chopping up lifeboats and people in the water. Violet's head was struck three times by a prop,

Two chapters are devoted to this and the aftermath. Violet suffered a fractured skull (which she did not discover until years afterward) and a "leg pierced to the bone, which took nearly three months to heal." Twenty-eight lives were lost.

Life at Sea

What I enjoyed most about the book were Violet's observations of shipboard life. She relates a number of amusing anecdotes involving crew and passengers. A drunken steward hid under a passenger's bed. During Prohibition a woman  took advantage of her ample bosom to smuggle ashore "a quart of champagne in her 'balcony'."

Then there was the time when a passenger died while at sea, and a friend kept company all night with the body and the widow in her cabin, until the ship rolled and the body fell off the bed and pinned her to the floor.

But eventually the long hours and hard work took their toll on Violet. She wearied of the "exacting demands" and "aggravating ways" of passengers. 

And because she was attractive she had to put up with the unwelcome attentions of both passengers and crew. She turned down several offers of marriage. A steward ran amok with a knife after she refused to kiss him. A ship's captain, after being rebuffed, dismissed her for being a flirt. During the WWI she ate great quantities of garlic-laden salami to discourage an ardent Danish sailor.

Ironically the one man she was interested in, a gifted mechanic from Australia, was too shy to make a formal proposal.

The Book

Her memoir went unpublished, but the year before her death she was visited by John Maxtone-Graham, who was conducting research about the golden age of transatlantic liners. He took on the task of editing Violet's book, and has provided many useful details about her life.

One chapter has gone missing, and there is no mention of a marriage, which Maxtone-Graham learned from Violet's niece. She married "so briefly and disastrously that not even her husband's name remains extant with the family."

It includes 24 pages of black-and-white photos.

Flush

A slim novel at just over 100 pages, this book by Virginia Woolf is about a dog named Flush, its owner an invalid involved in one of the most romantic love stories of all time, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

That's her picture on the cover from a sketch by her brother, Alfred. Woolf's inspiration for the book came from two poems that Barrett Browning wrote about Flush.

The dog is a spaniel, a gift from friend and fellow writer, Mary Mitford. The bond between Flush and his new master is strong. "He could read signs that nobody else could even see." But the bond is tested when he notices a change in her behaviour after she starts exchanging letters with someone. He could see "how strangely his mistress was agitated as she wrote, what contrary desires shook her." A hooded man arrives, a usurper whom Flush savagely bites, not once, but twice.

At this juncture in Flush's life, an epochal event occurs. He is stolen by a gang of thieves and held for ransom. This gives Woolf the opportunity to describe a London slum through the eyes of a dog, which she does with as much skill as Dickens. Flush is returned at last, only to face a greater crisis. He and his mistress steal out of the house and undertake a great journey.

They arrive in Italy where life is quite different from London. Barrett Browning's health improves, and even Flush becomes used to the change. His snobbishness wears off. He goes out on his own for hours without a leash and "speaks Italian to the little dogs." He eats grapes and macaroni, and is afflicted with fleas.

More great events follow. His mistress becomes "two people," and when the entire family returns to London, his chief desire is to leave. Back in Italy he and Barrett Browning grow old together.

Notes

Flush is accompanied by eight pages Woolf's notes, the longest of which concerns Barrett Browning's devoted maid. Woolf writes, "The life of Lily Wilson is extremely obscure and thus cries aloud for the services of a biographer." She married an Italian and remained in Italy after Barrett Browning died. "She was typical of the great army of her kind -- the inscrutable, the all-but-silent, the all-but-invisible servant maids of history."

This edition includes a five-page biographical note about Woolf, and a useful introduction which talks about Woolf's lifelong interest in animals, "real, imaginary, and metaphorical." Her nephew, Quentin Bell, is quoted as saying, "Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by a someone who would love to be a dog." 

The novel also has a more serious side, for example in the parallel between walking a dog on a leash, and women's subjugation to "the confining social laws of patrimony."

Other Doggy Treats

I enjoyed Flush because it was unusual, intelligent, and not afflicted with sappy sentiment. Here are some others that I've enjoyed. 

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung.  An abandoned four-year-old in Moscow is raised by feral dogs.

The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov.  A Russian surgeon transplants human glands into a dog and turns it into an idle, slovenly, and foul-mouthed Commissar "for the elimination of vagrant quadrupeds."  Written in 1925.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas. A semi-fictional memoir about the author growing up in Wales.

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams, author of Watership Down.  Two dogs escape from a place where experiments are carried out on animals.

 

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis. A man chases after his runaway wife to get his car back, following her all the way to Central America in a broken-down bus called "Dog of the South."

 

Skookum's North by Doug Urquhart.  "Paws" was the name of a cartoon strip that ran for many years in northern Canadian newspapers. The main character is Skookum, the lead dog of a team owned by Marten Fisher. They live in Fort Doggerel.

Welcome to Lagos

Several people in the Niger Delta are thrown together by chance. Two of them are army deserters, Chike and Yemi, unwilling to participate in violence against innocent people.

They encounter a boy with an AK47. He belongs to a militant group fighting for a share of Nigerian oil profits. His name is Fineboy and he is keen to be a radio presenter.

They are joined by two women, Isoken and Oma, one a young hairdresser fleeing the fighting near her village, the other fleeing her abusive husband.

The five of them form an uneasy alliance and travel by bus to Lagos where they end up sleeping under a bridge. By chance they discover a secret underground apartment, uninhabited but fully furnished. One night the owner shows up, a high-ranking government official named Sandayo. He too is in flight. Learning that he was about to be sacked and disgusted with government corruption, he absconded with ten million dollars.

The story takes a delightful turn when the group, after taking Sandayo prisoner, decide to spend the money on much-needed supplies for schools. Information is leaked to a local journalist, the story shifts to London where the BBC get involved, and a pompous newscaster is sent with a crew to Lagos.

I enjoyed the novel most when the focus was on the original five characters and the tumultuous day-to-day life in Lagos: the sights and sounds, the snippets from a newspaper that head the Lagos chapters, and especially the pidgin spoken by many. When Yemi, who has found work as a traffic warden, is asked where he learned the moves he makes while directing traffic, he replies:

“Nah me teach myself. I dey learn some new moves I go soon display.” 
“Chike doesn't see to dance,” Sandayo said.
“No o. You dey look him face think he's a small boy but inside nah old man.”

The result is a rich tapestry of life in contemporary Nigeria, as hinted at by the cover. If you take a close look at the hoarding, you'll see next to the author's name, Chibundu Onuzo, a thumbnail of the author herself.


BBC has a website in Nigerian pidgin.

Pushkin's Button

Russia's greatest poet received a fatal wound in a duel with a man who had been flirting with his wife. Yet such a bald statement fails to convey the byzantine events surrounding Pushkin's death.

D'Anthes

A handsome but semi-literate Frenchman with "a merry disposition, loose tongue, and ready wit." He was also "a tenacious and zealous flirt" who "preferred targeting married women." Above all he was an "impeccable inexhaustible dancer."

He was also lax in his duties as a cavalry officer, being “cited 44 times for lateness, unexcused absences, and other breaches of discipline.”

Baron Heeckeren

The Dutch ambassador took a liking to d'Anthes, supporting him financially and taking the unusual step of adopting him, even though d'Anthes's father was still living and they were not estranged. Subsequently Heeckeren made him his heir.

Described as "polished and shrewd” with "an elastic idea of truth," the Dutch ambassador's name after Pushkin's death became "synonymous with iniquity and deicide.”

Natalya

Pushkin was 36 when he died, his wife Natalya 24. Though she had given birth to four children, she was still the most beautiful woman in Petersburg and loved to dance. She was considered by many to be shallow and flighty.

Though it's true she and d'Anthes had been flirting, such behaviour at the time it was not considered improper. Pushkin on his deathbed told her, “None of this is your fault.”

Pushkin

Where d'Anthes was tall and blond, Pushkin was short and dark, the great-grandson of an African who came to Russia as a boy.

Vain, proud, aloof, volatile, and quick to take offence, Pushkin had already been involved in numerous duels and challenges. On one occasion he famously ate cherries out of a hat while waiting for his opponent to fire.

"A man under permanent special surveillance," he persisted in defying strict sartorial rules by wearing a coat with a missing button, an act that the author of Pushkin's Button says is hard not to see as "a mocking symbolic statement."

The Letter

The attention that d'Anthes paid to Natalya did not go unnoticed and became the subject of gossip, which Pushkin chose to ignore until he and several of his friends received a letter awarding him a cuckold certificate. The sender's identity is not known with certainty, but it is generally agreed that without the letters the duel would never have taken place.

Pushkin issued a challenge to d'Anthes, then withdrew it when d'Anthes agreed to marry Natalya's sister. A marriage ensued but the flirtatious behaviour between d'Anthes and Natalya continued.

Pushkin brought the matter to a head by writing an offensive letter to Heeckeren, accusing him of pimping for d'Anthes. If Heeckeren took the bait and challenged Pushkin, it would imply that d'Anthes was craven. This forced d'Anthes to issue his own challenge, which was exactly what Pushkin desired.

The Duel

A lane 20 paces in length was cleared in the snow. The first shot was fired by d'Anthes. Pushkin fell but managed to return fire, striking d'Anthes and knocking him down. The wound however was not serious. It was said that a button on his clothing deflected Pushkin's bullet. Pushkin's was a belly wound, and it took several days for him to die in extreme agony.

Pushkin's death is foreshadowed in Eugene Onegin and the short story "The Shot."

The Court Marshal

D'Anthes, Pushkin, and Pushkin's second were found guilty and sentenced to death. The judgment was a formality. Instead, d'Anthes was stripped of his rank and ejected from Russia. In Pushkin's case, the ruling was "a farcical black comedy," his hanging suspended "on account of death."

Heeckeren was recalled without being offered another posting.

Serena Vitale

The author is an Italian professor of Russian literature. The book was first published in Italian in 1995. The English translation by Ann Goldstein and Jon Rothschild appeared 1999.

Pushkin's Button is packed with excerpts from contemporary correspondence imparting an immediacy to the story, and the author uses a engaging personal style, making such comments as:

• For the first time we feel a twinge of pity for d'Anthes... 
• A mischievous urge inclines us to consider... 
• We dissolve in laughter, unable to read on. 
• And here we were wracking our brains! 
• Instead of giving up let us reread the invaluable text yet again...

Wilderness Tips

The title hooked me. I immediately wanted to see Atwood's take on such a Canadian subject, especially given her close association with the outdoors. In Negotiating with the Dead she writes:

At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

I found another of her books, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, to be a useful companion. It consists of four lectures she gave at Oxford in 1991, the same year Wilderness Tips was published. The lectures are on Sir John Franklin's last expedition, Grey Owl, the Wendigo, and women in CanLit.

Wilderness Tips contains 10 stories that portray a society morally adrift. All take place mainly in Toronto or in nearby cottage country.  The three I liked best all have an outdoor connection.

Wilderness Tips

There's a passing reference to the title story in Strange Things. Atwood says it includes a character who, like Grey Owl, wants to be an Indian, but in fact he's only a minor figure. The central character is a refugee named George who comes from a strife-torn European country. He speaks several languages but is still learning the finer points of English, as when he puzzles over a book with the name as the title of the story:

"Wilderness" he knew, but "tips"? He was not immediately sure whether this word was a verb or a noun. There were asparagus tips, as he knew from menus, and when he was getting into the canoe that afternoon in his slippery leather-soled city shoes Prue had said, "Be careful, it tips."

The setting is a summer cottage belonging to the family of George's wife. The cottage has the same name as a popular 19th-century Canadian novel, Wacousta, which Atwood discusses in her Grey Owl lecture. The title character in that book is an Englishman who disguises himself as an Indian in order to wreak revenge on his enemies.

George has come to Canada not to dress up as an Indian or to seek revenge. Rather, his masquerade as a charming and successful businessman hides a sinister past. The name he goes by, "George," is only an approximation of his difficult-to-pronounce given name.

George takes one more look at the paper. Quebec is talking Separatism; there are Mohawks behind the barricades near Montreal, and people are throwing stones at them; word is the country is falling apart. George is not worried: he's been in countries that were falling apart before. There can be opportunities.

The Age Of Lead

The main character has the same given name as Franklin's wife, Jane. She is watching a TV show about his last expedition. Forensic analysis of sailors buried on Beechey Island in the High Arctic revealed they were suffering from lead poisoning, the source apparently the solder used to seal their tinned food supply. It muddled the thinking of everyone on the expedition and contributed to its demise.

Jane's life has some disquieting parallels with the lost expedition. Her travels resemble the confused wanderings of the crew, and her material possessions are not unlike the useless items the sailors dragged along with them in their final overland trek and then discarded. Many of her friends are dying.

It was as if they had been weakened by some mysterious agent, a thing like colourless gas, scentless and invisible, so that any germ that happened along could invade their bodies, take them over.

"The Age of Lead" was inspired by the forensic discoveries described in Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger. In 2004 a new edition appeared with an introduction by Atwood and a quote from "The Age of Lead." In 2015 a book co-authored by Beattie, Franklin's Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus, includes quotes from Strange Things.

In Moving Targets, Atwood describes a visit she made to Beechey Island and how she carried away a pebble that she subsequently buried in Gwendolyn MacEwen Park in Toronto. MacEwen was a friend and author of a verse drama, "Terror and Erebus," which was broadcast on CBC Radio.

Of all the stories in this volume, "The Age of Lead" made the most appearances in magazines before being reprinted in Wilderness Tips: twice in the UK and once each in Canada, Germany, Australia and the US.  

Death by Landscape

My favourite story in the book begins by invoking the Group of Seven, whose landscapes are not done "in the old tidy European sense." They rarely include people or animals, and are often so stylized they are almost abstract.

The story centres around two girls attending a summer camp that encourages faux-Indian rituals. It's called Camp Manitou, and before a canoe trip they are urged to bring back "much wampum" and "many scalps."

Looking back on this, Lois, finds it disquieting. She knows too much about Indians: this is why. She knows for instance that they should not even be called Indians, and that they have enough worries without other people taking their names and dressing up as them. It has all been a form of stealing.

While on the canoe trip, Lois's friend disappears without a trace. The last that is heard of her is a shout: "Not a scream. More like a cry of surprise, cut off too soon. Short, like a dog's bark."

Possible explanations include suicide, foul play, and a bear attack. Another might be the Wendigo, a mythical monster discussed in Strange Things.

I doubt that I'll be able to look at another Group of Seven landscape without thinking of this story. 

The Other Stories

The ones I like best are:

"Isis in Darkness" - A man falls under the spell of a brilliant but mysterious poet whose work makes him feel “his own careful talent shrivelling to the size of a dried bean.” He ends up toiling fruitlessly in academia while she accumulates fame until her final unsettling appearance. (It's been suggested that MacEwen was the model for the poet.)

"The Bog Man" -  Another exhumed man, this time from a bog in Scotland. A woman has taken as a lover her archeology prof, "the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty raid."

"Uncles" - The daughter of a war widow works her way up in a newspaper and endures snide sexual innuendo from male colleagues. After she makes the jump to TV and achieves fame, she is attacked in a book by the only former colleague she respected. The story ends with an imagined scene of incomprehensible misogyny.

Daydreams of Angels

Twenty stories with a focus on mistreated children, particularly girls, but made palatable by the use of whimsy, fantasy, striking images, and unexpected developments.

Many of the stories are set in the past, as though it's a more suitable location for odd goings-on. In Messages in Bottles a pair of twins survive the sinking of an ocean liner in 1913 by floating away on their mother's cello. "This cello made such a mournful noise as it rode over the waves that a whale fell in love with it."

A fairy tale element underpins several of the stories. In Bartok for Children, a Canadian soldier is killed in occupied France, but brought back to life by a lonely toymaker who longs for a son. The ungrateful soldier seduces a woman by telling her whatever she wants to hear. With each lie, it is not his nose that grows longer.

In The Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec Pierre-Loup tours with another feral child, George LeCurieu, and meets a girl in a red coat.  “Why, that girl's so cute, I could eat her up.”

Sex is another major ingredient and several of the characters are prostitutes, yet there's nothing graphic or lurid. In Where Babies Come From the infants appear magically, washing ashore. “You would see their little bottoms peeking up from out of the sand, and if you dug them up quickly, they would be yours to keep.”

The title characters of The Gypsy and the Bear are left stranded in a story that a little boy is telling his tin soldiers. He is called away to lunch and they end up in a brothel.

Dreamlife of Toasters, in which two robots have sex and produce an unwanted child, reminded me of the skewed fables of Stanislaw Lem.  Other stories with science-fiction premises are Swan Lake for Beginners in which a Russian scientist creates batch after batch of Nureyev clones, and The Isles of Dr. Moreau where Grandfather dates a deer-girl, a lion-girl, a swan-girl, and a monkey-girl. 

Another aspect I liked is the way some stories take surprising changes in direction. In the title story, Daydreams of Angels, a shortage of senior angels occurs because they've been sent by God to a beach in Normandy. Consequently a cherub is assigned to a girl named Yvette in Montreal. After they sneak into her room at home, the story switches to her father as he lands on the beach in Normandy.

In The Man Without a Heart a black heroin addict steals from a single mother. When he gets out of rehab, he returns in order to pursue a relationship with her ten-year-old son. The story defies the reader's expectations.

One of the best features of the stories are the marvellous images. “We cover our ice cream in maraschino cherries. It's like clowns were caught in an avalanche and all you can see of them is their noses.” From the same story -- The Conference of the Birds, which features an unruly welfare family with quadruplets named Jay, Robin, Sparrow, and Turtledove -- comes the following marvellous bit:

Are you who you are when you are a teeny fetus? There are some people who will say that you aren't properly you yet. But of course you are.      You are you even long before that. You are you when your parents begin to get dressed in fancy clothes on Saturday night. You are you when your mother, who is barely twenty-one years old, puts on a pair of yellow lace underwear. When she plucks her eyebrows in the mirror and when she puts on a red dress that is cut really low and burgundy lipstick: that's all about you, baby.      You are you when your father, who is also twenty-one years old, pops a pimple on his forehead. When he puts on his fancy shiny shirt that was made by children in a sweatshop in Indonesia. When he isn't sure that he actually looks good—but he has been lucky twice before when wearing it.      They are both riding the subway in opposite directions to meet each other and you have already begun. That is your beginning. You have just as much right to be as anybody.

My favourite from this collection, "Daydreams of Toasters," I'm adding to a short list I keep of fantastic stories that have been indelibly etched in my mind. The others are:

"The Garden of Time" by J.G. Ballard
"Descending" by Thomas Disch
"Buffalo Gals" by Ursula le Guin
"The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline

The Brontes Went to Woolworths

I picked this up at a used bookstore because of the interesting title and attractive cover, and found the writing so engaging, so slyly humorous, that I read several chapters before realizing I scarcely understood what was happening.

I made an effort to be more attentive to the story, but a few chapters later was still rather lost, yet undeterred from enjoying the antics of the eccentric Carne family, composed of a mother, three daughters (Katrine, Deirdre, and Sheil), and a governess.

Most of the book is told from the POV of Deirdre, the literary-minded daughter who's written an unpublished novel and rambles on in a delightful but aimlessly dotty way. Katrine is studying drama, while Sheil, the youngest, is still in the care of the governess, Miss Martin, who grows increasingly distressed by the family's odd ways. 

I finally twigged to the plot when mention was made of a family "Saga." Much in the same way that the Brontes did when young, the Carnes amuse themselves by fabricating stories about their lives, their dog, their playthings, characters in books, and anything else that crosses their minds.

The fun ramps up when they meet a judge named Toddington, about whom they have been fantasizing as a family friend. He and his wife are amazed to discover aspects of their lives they know nothing about, but kindly join in on the charade so as not to upset Sheil, much in the same way that adults maintain the fiction of a tooth fairy for children.

The Carnes, then, are a humorous version of the Brontes (minus brother Branwell). Readers more familiar with that family of literary geniuses will likely be quicker on the uptake than I was. To top it off, the Brontes themselves make an appearance of sorts at the end.

The book was published in 1931 and at 188 pages is not long. I enjoyed it so much that, even before I was finished, I went online and ordered another by author Rachel Ferguson.

Nox

"A narcissistic exercise in bookbinding" is how a grumpy review in Walrus referred to Nox, an unusual work by Anne Carson that straddles the boundary between visual art and the written word.

It consists of a single sheet approximately 80 feet in length, but folded accordion-style to fit into a sturdy cardboard box.

It's an elegy for her enigmatic older brother, Michael, who died in the year 2000. He left the country to avoid going to jail, and spent the remainder of his life wandering about the world under a false passport.

Occasional postcards arrived but never communicated much. In death as in life he remained a mystery. His photo on the cover reflects this perfectly.

The departure point for this work is a brief poem by Catullus about his own brother who died in a distant land. It appears in Latin at the beginning of the book. Thereafter it is dissected, word by word, on the left side of two-page spreads, with all the various permutations that each word can take.

For example, an entire page is devoted to the word "et"!  Who knew such a tiny word could mean so much? Carson opens it up in much the same way the physical work unfolds.

On pages facing these explications are details of her brother's life. Translation thus becomes a metaphor for her attempt to understand him.

"I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch."

History is just as slippery. When Herodotus is invoked, it is with the caution that history often "produces no clear or helpful account."

Visually Nox is a collage, a scrapbook containing chopped-up photos and torn bits of paper. Even Carson's text appears on slips of paper. The single letter that Michael wrote home appears in pieces throughout as a sort of physical metaphor of Carson's fragmented knowledge of him.

Many pages are so brief, so elliptical, that the meaning is clouded, yet the cumulative effect is compelling. "No one knew him," she writes. He was mute in the sense of "a certain fundamental opacity of a human being."

It made me think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as applied to human quanta.

Nox is Latin for "night," a suitable title for a book about such a shadowy figure. In a way, we are all like Michael.

Heinlein & Norton

Craving some light summer reading, I opted for a couple of books by Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. I have very fond memories of their YA titles, which I devoured as a kid. 

These two are among their earliest, Red Planet being published in 1949 and Star Man's Son 2250 AD in 1952.

In both books two young men clash with authorities and undertake a perilous journey to escape pursuit. There are alien creatures in each book, as well as a bond between one of the young men and a non-human character.

  Red Planet                      Star Man's Son

The hardcover editions had illustrations that made the books extra special for me. Those in Red Planet were done by Clifford Geary, in Star Man's Son by Nicolas Mordvinoff. In each there was one that made such an impression that it became inseparable from my enjoyment of the book.

To my knowledge, the above illustration from Red Planet is one of the very few that made it into the paperback editions, but with a little searching you can find most of the others on the web. (I have taken some liberties by cropping the Mordvinoff drawing, as it was originally done as a two-page spread.)

Red Planet

Red Planet takes place on a Mars with canals, indigenous flora and fauna, and three-legged Martians who live in ancient cities. Humans inhabit several bubble settlements and work for a company engaged in an atmosphere project. The canals ice over in winter and provide an escape route for the two boys when they put on skates to flee. One of them has a Martian “roundhead” or “bouncer” as a sort of pet.

When outdoors, people must wear respirators, one of which is portrayed in the Clifford Geary illustration and used as a frontispiece in my Ace paperback edition. The zebra stripes are personal decoration.

After finishing the book, I made a surprising discovery. The version I read had been so mangled by an editor that Heinlein considered removing his name from it. Not until 1992 was a restored edition published by Del Rey.

In Imagining Mars, Robert Crossley devotes a few pages to Red Planet, saying, “Heinlein insists that Red Plant be read as an allegory, with Earth as the exemplification of Law and Mars of Freedom.”

Heinlein re-used some of the ideas he developed in Red Planet for his later best-seller, Stranger in a Strange Land. Though I have enjoyed a few of his adult books, my favourites are all YA titles, especially The Rolling Stones, Tunnel in the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Space Suit Will Travel.

Daybreak 2250 AD

Star Man's Son (reissued in paperback as Daybreak) takes place on Earth after the “Big Blowup” has caused mutations in people and animals, and rendered some areas uninhabitable due to radiation.

Fors has white hair which plainly marks him as a mutant and turns him into an outcast. But he also has superior hearing and night vision, and a non-verbal form of communication with a mountain lion – a vague sort of telepathy – that enables them to work as a team when hunting or battling foes.

Leaving his mountain home, he arrives on the plains and rescues a stranger named Arskane. They are put to flight by rat-like “Beast Things,” which were once confined to abandoned cities but are now venturing into the countryside.

To meet this threat Fors helps unite three suspicious groups of people, and it is here that Daybreak, like Red Planet, offers a moral. The groups are mountain-dwelling knowledge-seekers (Whites), plains people on horseback (native Americans) and drum-beating newcomers (Blacks) who have been displaced by a natural disaster. It's a well-intentioned but somewhat clumsy device.

Donald Wollheim, an influential editor at Ace Books, estimated that by 1971 a million copies of Daybreak had been sold.

As with Heinlein, my other favourite Nortons all came early in her SF period: Star Born, Galactic Derelict, The Last Planet, and Star Guard.

The Blue Tattoo

The Life of Olive Oatman

She was 14 years old when her family was massacred by Indians. She was enslaved by the killers for a year, then traded to a neighbouring tribe, the Mohaves, with whom she remained for another four years. When she returned to white society she wore a Mohave tattoo on her chin.

She became the subject of a best-selling book, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, and gave lectures about her experience to packed houses, yet for the rest of her life remained a somewhat shadowy and retiring figure, in part because of her freakish appearance.

So powerful was her story that it took on a life of its own. It was frequently repeated in newspapers -- usually incorrectly -- and attracted the attention of people who fabricated a connection with her.

"For all its recycling," writes Margo Mifflin, author of The Blue Tattoo, "the only constant about the Oatman story is that no two authors agree on what happened."

Olive Oatman has morphed into a sort of mythological figure, her most recent incarnation appearing in the TV series, Hell on Wheels. 

The Mohaves

Up to the time of her capture, the Mohaves had had little contact with white culture. They occupied a green valley along the Colorado River "for at least a thousand years." Their society was marked by affection, generosity, and laughter. The men were universally described as tall and strikingly handsome. They were excellent swimmers and "said to routinely run 100 miles at a stretch."

The Mohaves, then, were close to an early "state of nature" as idyllic as Rousseau might have described, and explains why Olive may not have wanted to leave. Although she gave contradictory statements about her time with them, it seems likely she was well-treated. Whether or not she ever felt completely at ease in white society is unclear.

In less than 10 years after she was repatriated, the Mohaves were shuffled off into reservations.

Captivity Literature

Amazingly -- 150 years later and despite its many errors and distortions -- Captivity of the Oatman Girls is still in print. It belongs to a genre I'd never heard of before, stories about women captured by Native Americans, and of which "nearly two thousand were published by 1880."

Blue Tattoo mentions a few such women: Mary Rowlandson, Mary Jemison, Hannah Dustan, Cynthia Ann Parker -- whose son became a Commanche chief, Quanah Parker -- and Eunice Williams, captured at age 7 in Massachusetts and taken to Canada where she was adopted by a Mohawk family at Kahnawake.

The context of captivity literature in the 19th century is discussed, particularly among women for whom it "presented a tantalizing alternative to enforced domesticity."

Religion

Olive was raised by Mormons, her father a reckless fellow who styled himself a preacher and a healer. In their trek west, he aligned himself with a splinter group led by a deluded prophet named Brewster. Squabbling among themselves further divided the group until the Oatman family ended up alone in a single wagon, continuing on despite the warnings of others. Their food was nearly gone when they were attacked.

After being rescued, Olive fell under the influence of a Methodist preacher named Royal Stratton, who ghost-wrote Captivity, described by Margo Mifflin as a "racist, religion-soaked tract" that "omitted, exaggerated, and fabricated information in order to deliver a title that was at once pious and titillating."

He died in an insane asylum.

Tattoos

Standing now astride two cultures, Olive unwittingly made history: she was the first known tattooed white female in the United States. The year Olive was captured, 1851, saw the publication of Moby-Dick, the first American novel in which tattoos defined an important character, Queeqeg. The tattooed captive became a common circus theme throughout the 1880s and '90s.

Fascinating and well-researched, Blue Tattoo includes an index, bibliography, footnotes, and numerous B&W illustrations. The 2011 paperback edition contains a new postscript in which a recently discovered letter by Olive is reproduced.

Full Tilt

Ireland to India with a Bicycle

Dervla Murphy's first book describes a journey undertaken in 1963. It took her six months to travel 3000 miles with an "average cycling day" of 70-80 miles.

The subtitle, however, is somewhat misleading, as the portion between Ireland and Teheran is covered in an 18-page introduction. The rest of the story is told in diary format with the first two chapters covering Iran and the final one India.

Thus the bulk of the book is devoted to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is full of praise for the wild beauty of the mountains and the instinctive honesty and generosity of the people she met. It is refreshing to read such a positive view of these two countries, but one cannot help wondering how well those characteristics have survived over the last 50 years. 

The book has three maps but no photos. The cover shows a pass in the mountains between Kabul and Bamiyan in Afghanistan.

Personal Safety

She carried a .25 calibre pistol with her and had to use it three times, the first when she was attacked by wolves in what is now Croatia, the second just before she reached Iran, when she used it to scare off a would-be rapist.

In Iran she used the gun for the final time to chase off three elderly men with shovels when they tried to seize her bicycle. Shortly afterwards she foiled another rape attempt (a police officer this time) with a kick to the balls. Occasionally she had stones thrown at her by kids, also in Iran.

Her only serious injury happened on a crowded bus in Afghanistan -- a rifle butt to the ribs delivered accidentally by an angry tribesman trying to get at the driver because of a sudden increase in fare. A week later she was stung by a scorpion the size of a mouse.

Due to the extreme differences in temperature, travel through Pakistan was physically the most challenging portion of the journey. It was there that she suffered heat stroke as well as dysentery.

The only thefts she experienced were minor ones and occurred in Iran and India.

Afghanistan

She travelled from Herat to Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad, with side trips to the Hindu Kush. She praises the splendour of the mountains and compares the Ghorband Valley (with its "neat vineyards," and orchards of "apricot, peach, almond, apple, and cherry") to the Garden of Eden. 

In Bamiyan she saw a 180-foot statue of Buddha carved into a cliff face (since destroyed by the Taliban), as well as the ruins of the "city of sighs" sacked by Genghis Khan in 1222.

Afghanistan was the only country "where not one single man of any type has made the slightest attempt 'to get off' with me." Men may be "hot-tempered and uncontrollably ferocious when roused, but once a dispute is settled without loss of honour on either side" they embrace each other and "sing a duet."

"The other day in a tea-house I made a casual remark to a total stranger about the postal rates here and he immediately offered to pay all my stamp bills -- a man with no shoes to his feet! This is typical."

Pakistan

She travelled the famed Khyber Pass to Pakistan, and continued on through Peshawar, Rawalpindi, and Lahore, with excursions into the Himalayas and the Karakoram Mountains.

She visited the Swat, Indus, and Kaghan Valleys, and saw ibex, the pugmarks of leopards, and butterflies the size of British robins. When travelling by horseback along precipices she became "so trustful that I positively enjoyed looking down to see nothing whatever between me and the torrent, 1500 feet below." 

She dined on goat meat and stewed clover, and drank salted tea and a local wine called Punial Water. Afterwards she cleaned her teeth with walnut bark, which she found better than ordinary toothpaste.

She saw a thrilling polo match where "blood was soon streaming from over half the twelve players' heads and hands and backs" yet "no tempers were lost." Meanwhile a band "played non-stop."

She was repeatedly "astonished by the hospitality and kindness of everyone in this part of the world." Starving peasants were willing to share their last egg with her yet reluctant to accept money.

Wheels within Wheels

Full Tilt ends abruptly in India, but -- as mentioned in her 1979 autobiography, Wheels within Wheels -- she then worked for six months without pay at a Tibetan refugee camp. She also describes how Full Tilt came to be published and felt it "less a personal triumph than the fulfilment of an obligation to my parents."

She began secretly planning her trip to India at the age of ten when she received an atlas and a bicycle as birthday presents. When her father died, she felt smothered by the task of caring for her demanding invalid mother. It was not until 1962 when her mother died that Dervla was free to make the trip that she had been planning for more than half her life.

Bear

Notorious when it was first published in 1976, and notorious again today after a cover image (not this one) went viral, Bear by Marian Engel has just been reissued.

The novel feels much more substantial than one might expect from its 141 pages. The backstory covers several generations, rather like a mini-epic in the manner of Robertson Davies.

There are frequent literary and cultural references to bears, and the important semi-wilderness setting is captured deftly and without fuss.

The characters are few but indelible. The protagonist Lou is a book-sheltered woman who meets a likeable rustic named Homer, and an ancient native woman who offers this advice:

"Shit with the bear. He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell. He like you."

Combine all these elements with perfect pacing and an aura of danger, and you'll have an idea of just how good this book is.

Names

The story is a modern fairy tale with a feminist subtext. The men have iconic names reflecting their status as males: Colonel Cary, Joe King, and the Director.

Homer's name suggests his role as a folksy patriarch, but despite his helpfulness he's not much different from other men in Lou's life. The way she resolves an issue with him is a key aspect of the story.

The three most important female characters all have masculine names. In addition to Lou, there is Lucy Leroy the native woman, and in a particularly clever touch the daughter of Colonel Cary, her given name bestowed upon her at birth to circumvent a will. Thus, she is Colonel Jocelyn, a tough capable woman "with big hands like a man" who could skin a lynx.

The bear, on the other hand, has no name. But it too is male, and in a scene I thought particularly humorous, acts like a typical guy:  

She put honey on herself and whispered to him, but once the honey was gone he wandered off, farting and too soon satisfied.

The Cover

When Bear first came out in Canada, the hardcover's dust jacket was bland and the paperback's cover lurid.

In reissuing the book, the publisher came up with a different cover for the trade paperback, and in a clever publicity gimmick invited several artists to submit alternative designs. You can see them on the publisher's website.

For Canadian Notes & Queries, artist Joe Ollmann created an illustration in comic-book style. You can see the full page by clicking here or here.

Bear in Mind

Animals are fascinating, but their Disneyfication sometimes blinds people to their potentially dangerous nature. I myself have seen people do very stupid things, like feeding polar bears by hand at the Churchill dump.

People, don't be stupid.

If you want to get close to bears, do it by reading. Here are a couple of books that I recommend. In The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle, a bear named Hal Jam becomes a famous author. And in a dark fantasy called Shardik by Richard Adams (he of Watership Down fame), a bear is worshipped as a deity by a primitive society.

Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Cola

A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train

An American woman boards a train in Vancouver for a mock-noir excursion into metafiction. She's wearing a pillbox hat with a veil, and is on the lam for paperhanging in Seattle. "Call her, Our Heroine."

Hot on her heels (and other parts of her anatomy) is a skip-tracer masquerading as a railroad dick. He wears a fedora and boards the train at China Bar, an unscheduled stop in the Fraser Canyon. "Why has the train stopped for this man? For the plot, of course."

He walks into the club car, "and there she is: Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Cola, like a book title. Is this a detective novel or what?"

They occupy adjacent compartments like "two different frames of a love comic," and travel across Canada in chapters as brief as this one:

His address is, at this point, nothing but train. On a stretch of bad track his entire past falls out of the overhead rack and spills on the floor like underwear or playing cards. "Drop something in there sir?" says the porter, who was passing by out in the aisle. "Yes but it's alright," says the Man from China Bar. Lying on the carpet is his identification, the real one, and his purposes, which are large and high-calibre. He shoves it all back into the suitcase. He looks at his shoelaces, which cross each other like two single-minded arguments, and wonders how he got here, wearing feet like this.

The novel's point of view jumps around, and at times Our Heroine addresses the reader directly. ("Remember that.") The writing is playfully existential, and as imaginative as one would expect from a winner of the G-G for poetry.

American money is long and narrow like Virginia Woolf’s feet. The train is going through evening like a detective through someone’s drawers. Her hair falls down her back like a lot of wilderness resisting agriculture. The train is pulling him forward like a zipper...

Author Paulette Jiles called the book a "mini-novel." It came out in 1986, weighs in at 105 pages, and ends - like a famous noirish film - at an airport.

Could Iqaluit be the Canadian equivalent of Casablanca?

Heat and Dust

The novel’s opening sentence tells us immediately that Olivia, the wife of an English colonial official named Douglas Rivers, ran away with the Nawab of Khatm.

What follows is an account of the events leading up to this scandal in 1923, based on letters that Olivia wrote to her sister. These letters have come into the possession of the grand-daughter of Rivers and his second wife. She has come to India is to learn what happened to Olivia after she ran away with the Nawab.

The stories of these two women weave back and forth as the grand-daughter acquaints herself with India, and although she says Olivia "was everything I'm not," she ends up replicating many of Olivia’s experiences. She too has two lovers, one English and one Indian. She too becomes pregnant, seeks an abortion, and finally follows Olivia into oblivion.

This double narrative is packed with other ironies, many of them subtle. Olivia for instance refuses to go into the mountains during the hot season with other English wives, whom she finds dull. She insists on remaining with her husband, but since he is away at work all day, she falls into company with the Nawab as a way of avoiding boredom. Thus her desire to remain with her husband sets up the circumstances for leaving him. And where does she end up? In the mountains where the Nawab buys her a house, and where she remains for the rest of her life.

Olivia

She "longed to be pregnant; everything would be all right then – he [her husband] would not change, she would not change, they would be as planned." She finally conceives but only after her affair with the Nawab has begun. Both men are delighted, their reactions virtually identical: "You’re not afraid? You’ll really do this for me? How brave you are." Then she has an abortion.

The Nawab

He is a minor prince, handsome and dashing, "a strong forceful character." But by the time he is 50 he has grown fat and womanly, and divides his time between his wife, his mother in Bombay, and Olivia in the mountains. When he comes to London he does not bring Olivia. He dies in New York City, and the palace is inherited by his nephew, Karim, who lives in London.

Inder Lal

He is the modern counterpart of a minor prince - a government official. His office is located in the house where the grand-daughter's great-aunt Beth (one of the women that Olivia found so dull) once lived. He sublets a room to the grand-daughter and has an affair with her. Like the Nawab he has a wife who is mentally ill.

The Grand-Daughter

She initiates her affair with Inder Lal at the same place (a shrine) after following the same custom (involving red string) as Olivia with the Nawab. Her abortion attempt begins in exactly the same fashion as Olivia's, although she changes her mind and stops the procedure. After visiting Olivia's house in the mountains, she heads for an ashram to have her baby.

Karim

Before going to India the grand-daughter meets Karim in London. He is as handsome and charming as the Nawab, and has the same admiration for their violent ancestor Amanullah Khan. He is just as interested in looting India as the Nawab, and is in partnership with a British couple who are described in terms similar to the Nawab's dacoits.

Names

The Nawab and the grand-daughter/narrator remain nameless throughout the book. The Nawab’s Indian wife is nicknamed Sandy, while the grand-daughter's English lover, who has come to India seeking enlightenment, is known only by his Indian name, Chidananda.

India

The grand-daughter says, "India always changes you." Major Minnies says, "India always finds out the weak spot and presses on it."

The Nawab says, "These people will never learn. Whatever we do, they will still cling to their barbaric customs."

Inder Lal says of his co-workers, "You don't know what people are like or what is in their hearts even when they are smiling with friendly faces."

Dr. Gopal enumerates the diseases of India and concludes by saying, "I think perhaps God never meant that human beings should live in such a place."

Chidananda returns from a pilgrimage a changed person. "All he will ever say - the only explanation he gives for his changed feelings toward India - is how he can't stand the smell."

The Book

Heat and Dust won the Booker in 1975. Its title reflects the squalor of India. Its brevity (181 pages) and personal tone belie its density.

I particularly liked the ironies, the ambiguities, the inconclusive ending. I also liked the twin timelines with the mirroring of events and characters - devices that are essential to the book's message.

But how palatable is that message? Perhaps the grand-daughter's departure from Olivia's path (deciding to have her baby) is an effort to blunt the book's negativity and end on a hopeful note.

In 2008 a retrospective review of Booker winners by Sam Jordison in The Guardian offered a damning verdict, calling the book "pedestrian...dull and pointless...literature for people who hate literature."

The Age of Shakespeare

Two nicely complementary books, one on Shakespeare by the ever breezy Bill Bryson, and the other a rambling and chatty overview of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights by Judith Cook.

The Bryson book is the illustrated and updated edition, about 50 pages longer than the original, and a worthwhile extravagance because the images are so useful in giving a sense of the time. For example, a reproduced Elizabethan document looks like gibberish and suggests the foreignness of the age. When in 2005 a performance of Troilus and Cressida was given using Elizabethan pronunciation, one critic reckoned he understood no more than 30%.

Shakespeare's life, says Bryson, is "little more than a series of occasional sightings." We're not even sure of his name, it having been variously rendered as Shagspere, Shakspere, Shappere, Shaxberd, and perhaps even Shakeshafte. He may have been gay. We don't know whether he was Catholic or Protestant. We don't know how many plays he wrote or in what order. We know nothing about his activities during a seven-year period before his arrival in London, a period that Bryson slyly devotes an entire chapter to. Inevitably, much of the book concentrates on life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, but context is not just necessary, it's fascinating.

However, what is known or suspected about Shakespeare is assembled with the usual Bryson industry and scope. The plays and sonnets are looked at from a variety of angles. We read about Shakespeare's stint as Burbage's house playwright, his apparent prosperity, and how his work was received in subsequent years. The book concludes with a chapter on the various claims that the plays were written by someone other than Shakespeare.

A Violent and Brutal Age

Fusing material gleaned from both books, an unsettling portrait of the times emerges. Recurring outbreaks of plague and the shifting tectonics of religion and politics made life dangerous at all levels of society. The Spanish Armada (1588) and the Gunpowder Plot to overthrow James I (1605) are two of the more famous events of the period, but there were also plots to depose or assassinate Elizabeth (e.g Essex, Ridolfi, Babington). She had an active intelligence network and at night slept with a sword by her side. Her refusal to marry or name a successor carried with it the ominous possibility of civil war upon her passing. (No wonder so many of Shakespeare's plays revolve around the transfer of power in a state.)

Hangings, bear-baiting and cock-fighting were forms of public entertainment. "Brawls," writes Bryson, "were shockingly common," as men carried swords and daggers and were quick to use them if they felt slighted. When Cook mentions the versifying of Spenser and Raleigh, she adds, "Renaissance Man indeed had many facets, but unthinking violence is rarely mentioned among them." (Which made me think of the Elizabethan adventurer, Martin Frobisher, and his ruthless dealings with the Inuit of Baffin Island, and the book by aboriginal historian Daniel Paul, We Were Not the Savages.)

"A significant proportion of the population," writes Cook, "lived below the poverty line." Vegetables were eaten mainly by the poor, while those who could afford meat supped on, among other things, "crane, bustard, swan and stork" (Bryson). Rotten teeth caused by sugar consumption was so common that some blackened healthy teeth as a fashion statement.

People believed in witchcraft. Tobacco was known but not tea or coffee. The age of consent for girls was 12, boys 14.

At the Theatre

Play-going was an intimate experience with two to three thousand people crammed into a theatre. No one was more than 50 feet from the stage and some even sat upon it. Prologues were employed due to the high level of illiteracy, yet attention spans were probably better than our own because it was an oral culture. People loved puns and wordplay.

Plays lasted three hours or more (four-and-a-half for Hamlet) without intermission. People ate and drank beer during the performance, and if they needed to relieve themselves buckets were available to piss in. Crowds were noisier than today’s audiences, unafraid to hiss or cheer, or even throw things. Pickpockets and whores were ever-present. Real bullets were used on stage.

Theatre companies consisted of about 15 actors and a handful of apprentices. Complete scripts were not handed out. Instead actors received a separate sheet or roll ("from which the word role comes" says Cook) containing only their own lines and cues. It was rare for a play to run two days in a row, which meant that over the course of a season an actor could be expected to learn 15,000 lines. Plays often concluded with a jig, an attempt to subdue post-play boisterousness.

All plays had to be approved by the Master of Revels and were subject to censorship.

Roaring Boys

Christopher Marlowe – The baby-faced fellow with the chilling stare is thought to be Kit Marlowe. Though he wrote only a handful of plays, he was hugely influential and famously praised by Ben Jonson for his "mighty line." Cook describes him as "flamboyant, outrageous in his behaviour and opinions, given to outbursts of violence," and may have served as the model for Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. He was involved in a fatal fight before he himself died in what was long thought to be a senseless tavern quarrel, but may in fact have been an assassination, possibly related to his having worked as a government spy. In the top left corner of the portrait is a Latin motto that translates as "That which nourishes me destroys me."

Thomas Kyd – His play The Spanish Tragedy was "the single most popular and successful play of its day, remaining in repertoire for thirty years after his death" (Cook). His acquaintance with Marlowe caused him to be imprisoned and tortured, an experience that shortened his life.

Ben Jonson - Known as the most erudite of the playwrights and also one of the most ill-tempered. He killed at least one man in a duel, a fellow actor. He was imprisoned more than once for the content of his plays. He was branded on the thumb and threatened with having his ears and nose slit. Shakespeare is known to have acted in one of his plays, and may have contracted his fatal illness after they were out drinking together. Jonson once walked from London to Edinburgh. He died impoverished.

John Fletcher – Followed Shakespeare as Burbage’s house playwright, very prolific and collaborated with a number of others, most notably Beaumont. He died of the plague and was probably buried in a common grave.

George Peele – "His name," Cook writes, "became a byword for riotous living and dissipation." He died of a "loathsome disease."

Thomas Middleton – Author of A Game at Chesse, a thinly disguised allegory satirizing the Spanish court. It "ran for an unprecedented nine performances" (Cook) and caused an international incident. When the Spanish ambassador complained, the Globe was shut down and Middleton imprisoned.

Robert Greene – A compulsive gambler, he took up with the sister of the notorious highwayman Cutting Ball Jack. At the end of his life he repented his riotous living and appalling behaviour in a pamphlet called "A Groatsworth of Wit" in which he called Shakespeare "an upstart crow."

Thomas Dekker - He and Jonson became embroiled in a "Poets War," lampooning each other in their plays. Cook gives a hilarious excerpt from his pamphlet "A Gull's Horn Book" in which a newcomer to London is given advice on how to make an impression:

Never cut your hair or suffer a comb to fasten his teeth there. Let it grow thick and bushy, like a forest or some wilderness. Let not those four-footed creatures that breed in it and are tenants to that crown land, be put to death... Long hair will make you dreadful to your enemies, manly to your friends; it blunts the edge of the sword and deadens the thump of the bullet; in winter a warm nightcap, in summer a fan of feathers.

Shakespeare Portrayed in Film

Having thoroughly enjoyed both books, I settled down to view a pair of equally entertaining but very different movies. First up was Shakespeare in Love, which so cleverly conflates aspects of his life with Romeo and Juliet. Then came the newer Anonymous, in which the Bard is a boob, an illiterate opportunist who takes credit for plays written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.