Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (Random House, 2020)
The title comes from a diary entry by Virginia Woolf. This is a set of accounts of five British women writers, mostly not much connected with each other, but who had this in common: that at some time or other between 1916 and 1940, even if briefly and not all simultaneously, they all lived in the same square in the Bloomsbury district of London. Three are famous creative writers: Woolf, H.D., and Dorothy L. Sayers; the other two are less well-known academic scholars, the Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and the LSE economic historian Eileen Power. But Harrison is of particular interest, since at this time and for most of her later years, she had a companion (their exact relationship is unknown, though Harrison referred to her as a "spiritual daughter") who is also prominent in this book: Hope Mirrlees, the author of the fabled fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist. Very few readers know anything about Mirrlees; you will find biographical info and a photo here, though nothing about what made her book what it was.
Sayers is the one of the five I know most about. She was only a year in Mecklenburg Square, during which she conceived and wrote the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, while living in the same rooms H.D. had vacated a year earlier. There's a lot on her brief romance with John Cournos, who shows up peripherally in H.D.'s and Harrison's stories as well. Busy guy.
Focused as it is on the writers' living space, this book concentrates on the practicalities of their lives, and how they carried out their work here, especially with two wars passing overhead; why they moved in and why they left. The rest of their lives is mentioned, but the bulk is on their time in Bloomsbury and how the place as it was at the time facilitated their work. As a whole, this is an exercise in demonstrating how an intellectual and creative woman finds a room of her own.
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Phillip Lopate, ed., The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present (Pantheon, 2020)
I picked this up off the library shelf because a quick glance at the contents showed it included two of my favorite 20C essays, E.B. White's "Death of a Pig," which begins:
I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.and Nora Ephron's "A Few Words About Breasts," which ends:
I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of sht.uncensored in the original of course, and a statement I've sometimes taken as a motto. I figured such a wise selection could include other worthwhile essays to learn about, and it did.
Lopate quite consciously seeks a variety of perspectives. He doesn't hesitate to put, near the beginning (they're in chronological order), Jonathan Edwards' Amos-Starkadder-like denunciation of sinners, but it's immediately followed by a chapter from Common Sense by Tom Paine, one of the few authors of his time who writes prose readable by current standards, which may partially account for his popularity in his own day. There's a whole raft of 19C feminists - Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Moore Grimke, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton - and some Blacks of the time too, of whom Frederick Douglass's good-humored and quietly confident letter to his old master is a highlight of the book. ("I have often thought I should like to explain to you the grounds upon which I have justified myself in running away from you. I am almost ashamed to do so now, for by this time you may have discovered them yourself.") Many of the most recent essays are representatives of burgeoning minority groups, whose airing, however legitimate, of their concerns in multiple gives an unfortunate hectoring quality to the close of the book.
There are many good and readable things here. Besides chapter excerpts, Lopate includes a few speeches, of which the mightiest are Lincoln's Second Inaugural and MLK's lesser-known 1967 speech on why opposing the war in Vietnam is a civil-rights issue. Here's a Mark Twain piece, new to me, on the course of his life emphasizing the role of luck and random circumstance producing a cascade of superficially unrelated events, concluding with "I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old." Here's the 1939 essay by art critic Clement Greenberg which, I gather, introduced the word kitsch to the English language, and does a better job of defining it than anything else I've read.
I was particularly struck by Marilynne Robinson's 1994 "Puritans and Prigs," in which she defines as "priggishness" that kind of sanctimonious denunciation of minor gaffes which has become even more common currency since Robinson writes. (And is further complicated by the perpetrators of major sins trying to hide behind the pretense that they're minor gaffes, see e.g. the defenders of DT's Billy Bush tape.) And even more so, I wish I'd known about Susan Sontag's ferocious 1964 "Against Interpretation" when I was in high school honors English where we were taught that the only purpose of reading literature was to ferret out the Hidden Meanings, which is the process that Sontag means by the (not very well chosen, actually) term "interpretation." I was so wearied by this that I wrote my own version of Sontag's (unknown to me, of course) arguments in a term paper. I got an F. I wish I'd had Sontag to wave at my teacher, but since my F reflected the teacher's disdain for my arguments more than flaws in my writing skill, I suppose she'd also have given Sontag an F. Shortly afterwards I dropped the class, and I've never read Joseph Conrad since.
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Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (University of Illinois Press, 2020)
In the last couple years, due partly to Alex Ross's advocacy, Price - a great mid-20C African-American woman composer - has been emerging from long obscurity. Both the San Francisco and San Jose symphonies are playing her work for the first time this upcoming season, for instance. It's dampening to read that Brown completed this book some twenty years ago, and it could have been published then. But only Brown's death in 2017 stopped her from doing more research, adding more discovered facts ... A rather Tolkienesque approach, actually.
It's a readable but dense book, most rewarding if you're deeply interested in Price's music. There are several chapters analyzing particular works, which I've read while listening to recordings to great benefit. I'm a fan of her symphonies, but it was here that I learned of her song setting of Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy," which is the poem where the line "I know why the caged bird sings" comes from.
But this book is also valuable for ethnographic background on the Black middle class of Price's day. You'll learn about the rise of Jim Crow in the Little Rock of Price's 1890s childhood and how it gradually suffocated the Black middle class (her father was a dentist; after he died, her mother, who could pass for white, went north and did so). You'll also learn about the high cultural aspirations, including classical music, in the Black community of Chicago, where Price moved, in the 1930s, and how she became locally renowned and even performed by the Chicago Symphony.
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Edward B. Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford, 2016)
This predates the last two US presidential elections, but it's useful background. It goes through just about every significant state- or federal-level disputed election we've ever had, and while the earlier ones are now only of rarified interest, due to changes in rules and circumstances, the recent ones have lessons to teach. For all his academic aloofness from the fray, Foley doesn't hesitate to express judgments as to what went well and wrong in each case, and there's generally useful lessons in here amid the blizzard of election-wonk detail. One is, the distinction between fair administration of the election - making sure everyone eligible can vote, preventing cheating - and fair counting of the ballots, which is a separate process. Another is ensuring that there are rules in place before the election to cover disputes afterwards. A third is ensuring a nonpartisan review process. A bipartisan one (half one party, half the other, especially if they all vote their party's side) doesn't cut it. The judicial panel that handled the Minnesota 2008 Senatorial election is considered a model here.
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