Adventure classics – A heart disciplined to disobey

The Nun’s Story

by Kathryn Hulme

***

Can a discipline be strong enough to transcend the very rules that formed it? wonders the protagonist of Kathryn Hulme’s 1956 novel, The Nun’s Story. Because as protagonist Sister Luke struggles to remain faithful to the rule – make that Rule with a capital R – of her order, she begins to find that its discipline, bit by bit has strengthened her finally to disobey it.

Hulme & Habets

Last Friday’s Adventure classics post left Sister Luke as a nurse turned novice in a Belgian convent. The time in the story is 1927, and Sister Luke is meditating on the discipline of the order she has chosen, a discipline less of the body than of the mind and spirit. With her sister novices, she sits in the convent’s garden stringing beans for the communal meal.

“No one uttered a regret for not being allowed to stroll that day through the gardens. No one looked up from her aproned lap to the flowering chestnuts and the slow drift of summer clouds above them. . . ” and she wonders if being a nun really requires this much attention to duty. It’s a wonder that she will look back on when Nazi paratroopers descend onto the quiet Belgian countryside a little more than a decade later.

And afterward, when “some of these sisters who sat beside her would disappear in the holocaust, not to be heard from for years. . .(to) reappear with worn pictures of saints sewn into the hems of disguising lay clothes and rosaries hidden in their shoes, and the world, stirred by their stores of endurance, would stare at news photos of those blessed objects and wonder how those alone had got them through. Because that would be all that they, the phoenix sisters, would be able to tell about their calvaries. . . They would have forgotten how the steel had got under their scapulars. . . ”

And Sister Luke’s scapular, the sleeveless, belted outer garment whose folds form a handy pocket for hidden things, has acquired nearly two decades of steeliness before the hospital run by her nursing order is completely overrun by the German invaders.

Like her real-life alter ego, Marie Louise Habets (religious name, Sister Xaverine), Sister Luke is the daughter of a famous Belgian doctor who dreams of performing heroic deeds of healing in the Congo missions of her order. Besides entering the convent, she has earned a degree as a nurse, with special training in psychiatry. But instead of being sent directly to Africa, she is distressed to be assigned first to a psychiatric hospital in her home country of Belgium.

Just as she has become inured to the silence and order of a convent, she is confronted by the clamor and chaotic behavior of maniacs. Just as she has learned the discipline of keeping her eyes cast down, she must unlearn it, and learn instead to attend to every sound and movement around her. When at last Sister Luke reaches the Congo, her new superior asks her to take on additional hospital and surgical work in place of a nun who has fallen ill. And she again learns to disobey – with permission – the call of the convent’s liturgical bells lest she leave patient and surgeon in the middle of an operation.

(In the movie version of Hulme’s novel based on Habets’ experience, Sister Luke falls in love with the irascible surgeon. In the novel, Sister Luke assures her superior that there is no romantic involvement, although Hulme makes it appear that the surgeon at least would be willing to move his relationship with the nurse-nun to a more personal level. But perhaps Hulme found it hard to believe that people wouldn’t want to fall in love with Sister Luke, as she was with Marie Louise, who would go on to become, in the discreet language of Hulme’s obituary, her companion and lifelong business partner.)

image: wikipedia

All of these sometimes-contradictory forms of discipline will go into the making of the Sister Luke who, in May 1940, will steel herself for work with the Belgian underground.

“On the evening of the day Brussels fell, a middle-aged man dressing like a farmer . . . came in with a cartload of refugees. . .” And he has a request for Sister Luke that will set her on a road to greater disobedience – or is it truer obedience? – than she has ever known.

In a twist stranger than fiction, the close subsequent relationship between Hulme and Habets has now caused most of Hulme’s books to be out of print. However, used versions of The Nun’s Story are widely available, as is a paperback version scanned from the original. Or renew a love affair with the movie version, available online, starring Habets’ fellow Belgian war refugee Audrey Hepburn.

(This is the final post of Adventure classics, as this blog turns from reviewing classics to contemporary books in 2017. But maybe I’ll be able to sneak in an older friend from time to time. . . )

Wordcraft – This year's resolution: read, review, repeat

The writer is on vacation. This post is a reprint first published December 29, 2015.

***

Resolutions have a way of sneaking up on us. I slid past last New Year’s Day without making any, only to realize a month later that a blog post about a friend’s books was really a book review. As much as I love to write, book reviews had always seemed reminiscent of the essays we all dreaded writing in school. Writing is fun, even when it’s hard. Essays are work. But a blog post once written—how easy is that, with maybe minor tweaking—to copy and paste to Goodreads, then to Amazon?

image: wikimedia

I tried the same thing with a few other posts from my Adventure classics series. Then the Dallas Mayor’s Summer Reading program, usually for kids, had a section this year for adults. Only we grownup readers had to submit a (gasp!) review of each book we read to qualify for the yummy prizes. After a summer of book reviews (duly posted also to Goodreads and Amazon), I figured I had the reviewing thing down. Sometimes readers even found them helpful.

And I thought: reviewing, it’s not that hard. The fact that, unlike in school, I wasn’t actually graded on it removed a lot of the pressure. And it’s a service to other writers and other readers, a way of giving back to the literary community.

It wasn’t until rather late this year that I started to wonder if there were actually any guidelines on how to write book reviews, other than the essay format we learned in school: tell people what you’re going to say, say it, then tell people what you said. With this additional caution for reviews: don’t tell them how the book ends.

Turns out, there’s quite a bit of information online about how to write a book review.

Mostly the advice turned out to be variations on the three-part method I learned in school, with some fine tuning, like this from the Writing Center at University of North Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences:

image: wikimedia 

1. Introduction (including the name of the author, title of book and main theme

2. Summary of content

3. Analysis and evaluation of the book

4. Conclusion, which is the old restatement issue

A few additional suggestions from UNC that I found helpful were: Review the book in front of you, not the book you wish the author had written. Be precise. (In other words, reviews such as one I read, that said, “it wasn’t what I expected,” aren’t precise. Or helpful to readers.) Never hesitate to challenge an assumption, but cite specific examples to back up your assertions. Finally, try to present a balanced argument about the value of the book for its audience.

The site Writing-World repeated the caution to review the actual book, not the one you wished had been written. I hope I don’t need to add that you actually need to have read the book before reviewing it? Or that you should check to be sure statements you attribute to the book are accurate? A review my book group looked at immediately lost credibility when the writer used the wrong names for the characters.

There’s also an entire cottage industry on the Internet about how to write reviews specifically for Amazon, including information from Amazon itself . (Note that Amazon’s guidelines apply to all product reviews, whether they’re for books or hula hoops.) And although you must have at some point used an Amazon account to buy a product or service in order to post a review, and the product (in this case, the book) has to be available on Amazon, you don’t have to have bought the actual book you’re reviewing from Amazon. Consider your review a service to potential customers of Amazon.

Other Amazon tips are: Include the “why”: the best reviews include not only whether you liked or disliked a product (book) but also why. Be specific. Don’t make a review too long or too short. Suggested lengths are between 75 to 500 words. Minimum length is 20 words, maximum 5,000. And finally, give an honest opinion, even if it’s critical.

Happy New Year and get those reviews out there!

Adventure classics – A heart hidden beneath a veil

The Nun’s Story

by Kathryn Hulme

***

It wasn’t until I read Kathryn Hulme’s 1956 fictionalized version of the life of her friend Marie Louise Habets, The Nun’s Story, immediately after Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, that I was struck by the similarities between the life in a religious order and life as a dedicated artist. 

image: wikipedia

As depicted by Hulme, Habets (known as Sister Xaverine during her time as a nun) learns to lead a life of simplicity, indifference to physical comfort, and renunciation of natural family ties to follow her vocation. Maugham’s narrator relates such similar details in his 1919 novel based on the life of painter Paul Gauguin, you’d almost think he was following the rules of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, the order Habets joined in the decade following publication of Maugham’s novel.

The rules, that is, with more attention to attire, and considerably more to chastity.

“The bravest of the emotionally vulnerable were the sisters who stood up together . . . (and confess) having gone out of their way to be near to one another, or perhaps for having talked together in recreation in a way that excluded others. Their tormented but clearly spoken disclosures of a nascent affinity gave it the coup de grace which they themselves might not have been able to do, for the entire community would henceforth see to it that these two would be kept far apart. . . ”

Eerily, the emotional detachment demanded by the religious rule echoes that of Maugham’s protagonist from his lovers, a detachment, however, which didn’t prevent physical consummation in his case.

(After leaving her order, Habets would become the recognized partner of Hulme, although without publicly admitting to their possible sexual relationship. But that’s leaping very far ahead in her story, which begins in the late 1920’s, when she, and her fictionalized alter-ego Sister Luke, first enter religious life.)

image: wikipedia

“It was odd to be thinking about Lourdes,” Sister Luke reminisces as she first dons the garments of her new life. She had been a nursing student – the only lay student chosen from her training school to escort a group of patients from Belgium to the shrine where an apparition of the Virgin Mary had appeared in the mid-19^th century near the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. The site soon acquired a reputation for miraculous healings.

There were some physical cures, a skeptical Gabrielle Van Der Mal (the nascent Sister Luke) admitted, but what surprises her most is the happiness of the patients after their return.

“That is the real cure,” says her nun-supervisor, Sister William.

“And then Sister William had given her sleeve a little tug in the discreet manner of the vowed, who. . . must never lay hands one upon the others," Sister Luke remembers. "The pull at her sleeve had been more unusual than Sister William’s teasing words, for it was the attention-drawing language of nun to nun, than of nun to lay person. As if I were one of them. . . And now she was one of them.”

But she still has far to go, often finding herself straining against the order’s toughening rules.

“It is almost an exaggerated thing, she thought, this discipline. It is surely more than any of us could ever need in the safe communities where we shall be. . . She could not know then, on that summer day in 1927, that in little more than a decade their ordered world would rock and twist like the epicenter of an earthquake and that the walls she imaged would always protect them would crack in many places and fall in heaps of rubble to the ground.”

Will her own discipline be strong enough to endure those trials to come?

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a December of adventures of the spirit with Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story.)

Wordcraft – Books and reviews to mix & match

The first time I noticed my ranking among Amazon’s reviewers, I was 1 million plus something. And I thought – wow, Amazon even has algorithms for ranking reviewers? Of course, I set my sights on #1, only to find that top rated reviewers gain their status by reviewing everything. In fact, thousands of everythings. Including baby shampoo. (The package was in good shape, it arrived quickly and the shampoo cleaned the reviewer’s hair nicely! A 5-star review!)

image: wikimedia commons

I decided to stick to reviewing books, occasionally posting reviews on this blog as well.  As I contemplated more book reviews for 2017, I enjoyed looking back at reviews posted in the past 12 months and thought – why not do a brief share with readers? Here are the openings of my reviews of several recent books by Texas authors and their titles/authors. See how many you can match. Better yet -- read the books for yourselves!

Review openings:

1)      Psychopaths make the best villains – in life as in fiction. But a psychopath as a main character? That’s what this Texas author has accomplished with a book whose anti-hero flashes the glibness and charm (superficial though they may be) of a true psychopath in a way that will have readers cheering for him against their will.

2)      Jane Austen fans can have Elizabeth Bennet – my fav Austen heroine is Emma Woodhouse. Yes, that Emma, the insufferable know-it-all who tries to fit her friends into incongruous romances while remaining blissfully unaware of her own admirer, her almost equally know-it-all brother-in-law George Knightley. So I was delighted to find the Emma-Knightley trope still alive and well on the plains of West Texas.

3)      Shortly after Saving Private Ryan appeared in movie theaters, I was aghast to hear that one of my co-workers had taken her then-teenage son to see it. She did it, she said, to keep him from getting any ideas that war was glamorous. Then came 9/11, and wars when both civilians and soldiers die – or sometimes worse, live – without any thought of glamour, under circumstances of almost unimaginable, unremitting horror. Those are the kinds of wars this Texas author writes about.

4)      The latest installment in this Texas writer’s series of thrillers starring an ex-CIA agent is the story of a plot to assassinate an autocratic, plutocratic ex-KGB agent who happens to be president of Russia. Readers may rest assured that the Russian president in question is completely fictional. Any resemblance between him and current Russian president and billionaire ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin is, of course, purely coincidental.

5)      A tall handsome stranger rides into a small Texas town just vacated by a corrupt law enforcement official. It’s the classic Western scenario, lovingly but devastatingly updated for the 21^st century by this Texas author. But unlike the horse opera versions of the story, this hero can’t ride a horse, dislikes getting his city slicker shoes dirty, and has no patience for cows. And he comes with a load of modern-day angst – a wife who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, a previous job he left under a cloud, and an angry teenage son.

6)      One spring day in 1940, a 29-year-old West Virginia coal miner went to work as usual. Wearing his carbide lantern helmet, carrying his dinner bucket, he said goodbye to his wife and three children, the youngest a five-month-old infant. His family would never see him alive again. In compensation for his death, the mining company paid his widow one thousand dollars. It also ordered her to clear out of the little company house she rented, because on the first day, the family of the miner who would take her dead husband’s place was moving in.

image: wikimedia commons

 Titles/authors:

            A)    Stillwater, by Melissa Lenhardt

B)    The First Order, by Jeff Abbott

C)    Steel Will, by Shilo Harris

D)    Interference, by Kay Honeyman

E)     Running on Red Dog Road, by Drema Hall Berkheimer

F)     Hollow Man, by Mark Pryor

(Answers: 1, F; 2, D; 3, C; 4, B;5, A; 6, E)

Adventure classics – Receding from life into legend

The Moon and Sixpence

by W. Somerset Maugham

***

“. . . you are a unique and legendary artist, sending to us from the remote South Seas disconcerting and inimitable works which are the definitive creations of a great man who, in a way, has already gone from this world. . . You are already as unassailable as all the great dead. . . ” – George Daniel Monfreid to Paul Gauguin, October 1902

Within little more than six months after French artist Paul Gauguin  received the valedictory letter from his friend Monfreid, quoted above, he was indeed dead, and rapidly receding into legend. It was a death that would be convenient for William Somerset Maugham, whose 1919 fictionalized version of Gauguin’s life, The Moon and Sixpence, furthered the romance of a misunderstood genius. 

Convenient, that is, because dead men don’t sue. They don't even write unpleasant literary reviews.

Maugham had already gotten into trouble by fictionalizing living celebrities when notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley attacked him in print over his 1908 supernatural thriller, The Magician. Although Crowley’s real cause for anger was that the principal character in the book was based on himself, his review instead charged Maugham with plagiarism. The incident still smarted enough to prompt an otherwise puzzling preface about plagiarism for the 1933 edition of The Moon and Sixpence, in which he states, “. . . I would say that any writer is justified in taking from another whatever can profit him. . .”

Paul Gauguin, c. 1892

(Years afterward, a similar contretemps would arise when Maugham’s 1930 novel, Cakes and Ale, appeared to contain disparaging portraits of authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Hardy was at the time recently dead, but Walpole was still so much alive that Maugham felt obliged to write him a letter denying the resemblance. Still later, however, he would write that Walpole had indeed been the inspiration for one of the novel’s characters.)

Gauguin, however, might have thanked Maugham for his fictionalized portrait in The Moon and Sixpence, which actually played down Gauguin’s scandalous lifestyle. In Maugham’s version, Gauguin’s English alter-ego, Charles Strickland, is the epitome of the starving artist, dedicated with almost-religious devotion to his art, unappreciated during his lifetime but adored after his pathetic death, whose career ends in a blaze of glory as his lover obeys his final command by burning down the house that contains his masterworks.

Or maybe Gauguin, who had been a successful stockbroker and art dealer before turning to art full-time, would have been outraged by such waste.

Let’s pick up Maugham’s story where it left off after last Friday’s post.

Paul Gauguin, 1902

After leaving his wife and family to study art, forty-something Charles Strickland has studied art alone in the proverbial Parisian garret before becoming determined to seek more inspiration in the South Sea island of Tahiti. He has, admittedly, had an affair with the wife of another artist that ends tragically in his lover’s suicide.

(Yes, this hits enough clichés to justify critic Edmund Wilson’s claim of wonder at “the writer’s ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.” Maugham actually had a rather modest view of his own abilities, but given his commercial success – and literary longevity – he would probably have laughed all the way to the bank about Wilson’s quip.)

Back to the story: After taking a young Tahitian girl as his common-law wife, Strickland settles on her small coconut farm, and devotes himself to painting.

“Ah,” says the informant of Maugham’s unnamed narrator, “I wish I could make you see the enchantment of that spot, a corner hidden away from all the world, with the blue sky overhead and the rich, luxuriant trees. It was a feast of colour. . . ”

However, it soon becomes apparent that Strickland has contracted leprosy, which in those days before antibiotics was incurable. Further withdrawing from the world, he spends his few final years of life painting the walls of his small house with his visions of paradise. The doctor who is called to his house arrives to find him dead, and “start(s) back in dismay. ‘But he was blind.’’ And Strickland’s lover replies, “Yes; he has been blind for nearly a year.”

And the doctor marvels at the painter, imagining him sitting “hour after hour in those . . . rooms that he had painted, looking at his works with sightless eyes, and seeing, perhaps, more than he had ever seen in his life before.” 

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a December of adventures of the spirit with Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story.)

Wordcraft – Winter is the new spring for literature

So many literary events coming up, especially in North Texas, I can’t wait for the new year to start announcing them. Here’s a list of upcoming contests, conferences, and readings, in order of urgency. I’ll post more later in the year, once spring really arrives. . .

image:wikimedia commons

December 16-18, 2016: Here’s one for us bloggers! From DL Hammons, the guy who brought you the WRiTE CLUB writing challenge, it’s Déjà vu Blogfest. Sign up at his site. Then during the weekend of December 16-18, re-post your favorite blog offering from earlier in the year, or one that you believe failed to receive the exposure it deserved. No fee, no writing required!

December 31, 2016: The final “Dear Lucky Agent” contests of 2016 from Writer’s Digest blogger Chuck Sambuchino focus on memoirs and historical fiction. All they cost are two mentions in any form of social media. See the sites for rules and sample wording for your social media mentions, using this TinyURL for historical fiction and this for memoirs.

January 1-June 1, 2017: Moonlight Mesa Associates’ Cowboy Up contest is back, with this year’s entries including both fiction and nonfiction. Fee: $25. Cash prizes. See site for details.

January 10, 2017: Authors LIVE! Presents a conversation with four great Texas writers, H.W. Brands, Stephen Harrington, S.C. Gwynne, and Lawrence Wright, at 7 p.m. in Wesley Hall of Highland ParkUnited Methodist Church, 3300 Mockingbird Lane, in Dallas. Free. No registration required. Some books will be available for sale and signing afterward. Sponsored by Friends of the Highland Park Library, Friends of the SMU Library, and Highland Park United Methodist Church.

January 12, 2017: The Writer’s League of Texas opens its 2017 season of Texas Writes – programs for rural libraries, in Edna, Texas. I’ll mention some later in my home region of East Texas, but see the site for complete schedule and details.

artist: van Gogh

January 14, 2017: Dallas Museum of Art opens its 26^th season of Arts & Letters Live with the appearance of Zadie Smith, discussing her new novel, Swing Time. In the DMA’s Horchow Auditorium, 7:30 p.m. $40 for the public, $37 for DMA members, students and educators. All tickets include a hardback copy of the book.

January 15, 2017: Closing date for the Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contest. Submit your first 10 pages plus synopsis for chances to have your work professionally critiqued and meet with a literary agent of your genre. Cost: $55 for WLT members, $65 for nonmembers. See the site  for details.

February 4, 2017: Writers’ League of Texas presents “Texas Writes” program at Mt. Enterprise Library, 201 NW 2^nd St., Mt. Enterprise, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Pre-register at 903-822-3532.

February 10-12, 2017: ConDFW, a literary science fiction and fantasy convention, at Radisson Fossil Creek hotel, 2540 Meacham Blvd., Fort Worth. Adult 3-day memberships $40 through January 31. Single day and children’s memberships also available. This year’s author guest of honor: Rachel Caine (Morganville Vampires).

February 16, 2017: Writers’ League of Texas presents “Texas Writes” program at Lillie Russell Memorial Library, 200 E. Hubbard St., Lindale, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Pre-register at 903-822-1900.

February 23, 2017: Highland Park Literary Festival, with guest author Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet). Book signing 5-6:15 p.m., Highland Park High School, 4220 Emerson; keynote address by Ford at 7 p.m. in the HPHS Palmer Auditorium. Free and open to the public.

February 28, 2017: Deadline for Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards Contest for books published in 2016. Fee: $40 per title for WLT members, $60 for nonmembers. See the site for details.

Adventure classics – Succumb to the lure of an island

The Moon and Sixpence

by W. Somerset Maugham

***

How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island? . . . across the sea, great big coconut tree? – Lyle Moraine

“. . . but for the hazard of a journey to Tahiti I should doubtless never have written the book,” says the unnamed narrator of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 novel, The Moon and Sixpence, based loosely – and the operative word is “loosely,” on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin.

Gauguin, 1879

Unlike the protagonist of Maugham’s story, English stockbroker turned painter Charles Strickland, Gauguin had painted for nearly two decades before making Tahiti one of several of his artistic destinations. But in popular imagination – helped possibly by Maugham’s fictionalized version – his name is forever linked with his time on the French Polynesian South Pacific island. (Although Gauguin had become a stockbroker as a young man, he was already an established painter strongly influenced by Impressionism even before a stock market downturn influenced him to become a fulltime artist, as shown by the 1873 painting of a snowy landscape that is one of the illustrations of this post.)

And as I look out my window at a garden lapsing into wintry grayness, I can sympathize with the longings of Gauguin, and his fictional alter ego, Charles Strickland, and even Maugham, for the blue skies and bright light of the legendary island.

Maugham had visited the island in 1916 while researching his book (he was at that time also working with the British Secret Service and travelling extensively Asia, experiences he incorporated in later books). Also, like Strickland, who abandons his conventional wife, Maugham may have found being half a world away from his own romantic entanglements a relief.

Although he was primarily attracted to men, his affair with an unhappily married woman, Syrie Wellcome, who had given birth to Maugham’s only child in 1915. Syrie and her husband had been separated for some time (and she was reputed to have add other affairs), but the birth of her child was apparently the last straw, and her husband divorced her, naming Maugham as co-respondent. Syrie and Maugham married in 1917 but spent most of their marriage apart before finally divorcing in 1928.

Maugham would later deny paternity of their child, and Syrie, now Syrie Maugham, would become a sought-after interior decorator famous for all-white rooms. It would be no wonder if Maugham hankered for brighter colors, and his description of his first sight of Tahiti is full of wonder and delight – “. . . a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker green, in which you divine silent valleys. . . Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to the enjoyment of the moment. . . (at the harbor of Papeete) the color dazzles you.”

Wait! Just one minute – when we left the story last week, Maugham’s hero, Charles Strickland, had just run away to Paris and was living in a fashionable district in the luxurious Hotel des Belges with his young mistress. Or was he?

Maugham’s unnamed narrator follows Strickland’s supposed trail, only to find that the only hotel of that name was in a “quarter that was not fashionable; it was) not even respectable. . . It was a tall, shabby building, that cannot have been painted for years, and it had (a) bedraggled air. . . It was not here that Charles Strickland lived in guilty splendor with the unknown charmer for whose sake he had abandoned honour and duty.”

Still, the narrator persists, and finds Strickland indeed, with “no sign of the abandoned luxury (Strickland’s family) had described.” And Strickland is alone, so much so that when the narrator asks, Strickland replies that of course he’s alone, because his French is too bad to carry on conversations.

Still, the reader might have some reason to expect romance. It’s Paris!

Gauguin, 1887

But although the earlier part of Maugham’s story is ostensibly set in the late 19^th century (Gauguin, after all died in 1903), for the initial readers, the shadow of World War I’s horror hung over the city. Everything is dark and shabby, including the affair Strickland does fall into with the wife of a fellow painter, who commits suicide when he abandons her also. (Syrie Maugham, fortunately, did not take the hint, surviving Maugham’s subsequent abandonment quite nicely.)

But Strickland has, at least, tired again of conventions and is on the lookout for some place where he can paint without such hindrances. He makes his way to the port of Marseilles, hoping to find work on a ship sailing toward the South Seas.

“It is here that I purposed to end my book,” Maugham’s narrator says. “I wished to leave Strickland setting out with I know not what fancies in his lonely soul for the unknown islands which fired his imagination. I liked the picture of him, starting at the age of forty-seven, when most men have already settled comfortably in a groove, for a new world. . . but I could not manage it.”

Maugham had actually tracked down a Polynesian woman Gauguin lived with in Tahiti, but found her as uncommunicative as his fictional character, Charles Strickland. So excusing himself with the statement that “(he) made no particular impression on the people who came in contact with him in Tahiti. . . remarkable only for the peculiarity that he painted pictures which seemed to them absurd; and it was not till he had been dead for some years and agents came from the dealers in Paris and Berlin to look for any pictures which might still remain on the island, that they had any idea that among them had dwelt a man of consequence.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a December of adventures of self-discovery with the rest of the story of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence.)

Wordcraft – The end is nigh – make way for the beginnings

It’s almost time to say goodbye to 2016 – what a long, strange year it’s been! And as it gallops furiously toward its close, I’m also facing endings – and some new beginnings. This past weekend I answered an email from beloved Dallas literary institution, the Writer’s Garret, to help it move out of its present home and into a new one. This will be its second move of the decade, and the end of its space-sharing partnership with independent bookstore Lucky Dog Books (previously Paperbacks Plus) as the building in the Lochwood neighborhood of Dallas that has been the two institutions’ joint home is under new ownership.

Writer's Garret moving in!

It’s not the end for either Lucky Dog (which has two other locations in the Dallas area), and certainly not for the Writer’s Garret, which has new digs in at Metropolitan Press, 1250 Majesty Dr., in Dallas. Metropolitan Press is a commercial printer which also describes itself as “passionate about helping nonprofit organizations.” In addition to housing ArtSpace, a revolving gallery for local visual artists, it houses the offices of Shakespeare Dallas and – beginning January 2, 2017, the Writer’s Garret. The new space looks great, and includes use of a shared meeting room and kitchen/dining area.

As the illustration for this post shows, there’s still a lot of unpacking and rearranging to do before the Writer’s Garret opens in its new location. And believe me, there’s a lot more stuff still at the Lucky Dog location. The Garret will continue operations at Lucky Dog, 10809 Garland Road in Dallas, until December 17, closing temporarily for the last two weeks of the year to put the finishing touches on its new home. I hope to keep readers posted about the transition, with a peek at what the new space looks like with everything in place, early next year.

***

And then there’s NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month organization whose aim is to prompt writers to put 50,000 words of their novels on the page (or screen) each November. But November has ended, hasn't it? Not quite. My local Dallas-Fort Worth region has a final event scheduled for 2016 – “Commiseration and Relaxation,” a time for writers to read excerpts from their manuscripts and celebrate their accomplishments. Drop by the Nicholas P. Sims Library, 515 W. Main St., in Waxahachie, Texas, this Saturday, December 10, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. to meet some of the 1,891 novelists who collectively wrote 28,535,801 words during this past month. (My contribution was a modest 13,047 words.)

And then prepare for the “Now What?” months of January and February when all those words get edited and revised. See the site for details of upcoming “What Now?” events and use these long winter nights to browse some of the material. (I’m looking at “5 Ways to Keep Me Reading Your First Chapter,” in the NaNoWriMo blog section.)

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My blog at this site will also undergo some endings and some beginnings. The Adventure classics portion of this blog will come to an end on the last Friday of 2016 (December 30) to make room for more reviews of current books in 2017. The Wordcraft portion will effectively continue, with regular updates each Tuesday, beginning January 3, 2017, but without its subtitle. Although I’m keeping Tuesdays as the anchor day for posting, I hope to publish additional posts during the week as time and material permits, without committing to further scheduling. I hope this will allow me to post some of the reviews authors have been requesting, as well as keep readers posted on current literary events in a timely manner. When great stuff happens at a convention or festival, I intend to post about it not only on Tuesday, but Wednesday and Thursday as well, maybe even Friday, instead of holding it all in until the next week.

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Finally, speaking of literary events, I couldn’t resist the lure of the last two “Dear Lucky Agent” contests of 2016 from Writer’s Digest blogger Chuck Sambuchino. My last Tuesday’s post was about writing memoirs, which are known to be hard manuscripts to impress agents with. How great would it be to get feedback – maybe even land an agent – for our memoirs, and do it all for free? Through December 31, 2016, we can, and all it costs is two mentions in any form of social media. There’s nothing to lose!

Oh, and for writers of historical fiction – like me! – there’s a sister contest. Again, two social media mentions. Sambuchino even provides sample wording for those mentions. Easy TinyURLs to use are http://tinyurl.com/j4d3kqz for memoirs and http://tinyurl.com/zodcsgo for historical fiction.

A literary agent will judge each contest. The top three winners in each will receive a critique of the first 10 pages of their manuscript from their agent/judge and a choice of Sambuchino’s two literary marketing guidebooks coming out in September 2017. See the sites for details.

Adventure classics – Blurring the lines between art and truth

The Moon and Sixpence

by William Somerset Maugham

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‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. – Francis Bacon

W. Somerset Maugham

So, the first thing you need to know to read W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 fable, The Moon and Sixpence, is that it’s not a biography of  artist Paul 

Gauguin. It just seems that way.

This aspect of truthfulness is something that’s been in the news a lot recently, as sites such as Facebook and Google confront audiences’ confusion about what’s true and what are distortions intended to sway opinion. This issue of true vs. false has also been on my mind. Sometimes it because I see fellow writers struggling with the “truthfulness” of remembered events and conversations in memoirs. 

I even find myself struggling with it as I report conversations in blog posts. Should I adhere literally to my notes, using ellipses to indicate every occasion in which I juxtapose phrases from discussions? And how pertinent to readers understanding are the omissions? Or will readers merely feel befuddled by the conversational ramblings that occur in unscripted speech?

Gauguin would have understood. Visual artists can face even more drastic decisions: they have to represent a static moment of four-dimensional reality on the two dimensions of a piece of canvas. It’s as daunting a task as compressing decades of a person’s lifespan within the covers of a book.

To some extent, Maugham seeks to overcome his dilemma by differentiating his fictional character, Charles Strickland, from the inspirational Gauguin and by telling his tale in the mock documentary form of interviews with people who knew (or claimed to have known) Strickland. (In one case, informing readers that a so-called acquaintance of Strickland’s “was an outrageous liar, and I dare say there is not a word of truth in anything he told me. I should not be surprised to learn that he had never seen Strickland in his life. . . ”) Still, for the sake of what I’ll call “truthiness,” I’ll punctuate my discussion of Maugham’s life of his fictional character, Charles Strickland, with fact checks from Gauguin’s actual life.

Maugham’s Strickland enters the story as a successful, apparently happily-married stockbroker, with children. He is burly, red-haired, middle-aged, and seems to have no artistic or intellectual aspirations up to the point of what we would now call his mid-life crisis. And he’s English.

Paul Gauguin self-portrait

(Fact check: Well, for starters, Gauguin was French. And as you can see from the self-portrait I’ve inserted in this post, he was not burly or red-haired. He had been an art dealer and an avid painter for years before deciding to pursue a fulltime career as an artist. However, he was married, with even more children than the fictional Strickland, and had been a successful stockbroker for years until a market crash, which seems to have been the impetus for turning exclusively to art.)

Maugham’s misogyny, by the way, is in full cry on the pages of The Moon and Sixpence. Although he was essentially gay, he had an affair with a married woman (who would become famed interior decorator Syrie Maugham). Given the messiness of Syrie's divorce, her subsequent marriage to Maugham, and their own later separation, the writer may have been feeling as stifled as Charles Strickland was in his family life.

Maugham’s never-named narrator provides a lengthy account of his own early literary biography (replete with horror stories of rapacious women) to explain how he became an acquaintance of Strickland. Shortly after a single meeting at a dinner party with Strickland, he learns that the stockbroker has deserted his wife and children and fled to Paris. 

Everyone suspects that fortyish Strickland has had a midlife crisis (although that term seems not yet to be invented) and has eloped in a love affair. Maugham’s narrator has previously received an invitation to a literary tea from Mrs. Strickland, and it is from her and her sister and brother-in-law that he hears supposed details of the elopement. Rather oddly, the grieving Mrs. Strickland declines to confront her husband directly, instead calling in a near stranger to track him down in the Paris hotel where he is said to be living in luxury with his mistress.

And the fun – because it is really fun – begins. Because truth, even the simulated truth of a novel, can be both stranger and more complicated than our imaginings.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a December of adventures of self-discovery with W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence.)