(Image source: YMD.org)

“You can’t drink wine and not eat cake!” said Battle.  “Look here.  What kind of house is this?”

I’ve written before, here, about my love for Eudora Welty’s writing.  My high school freshman English teacher introduced me to Welty – insisting my mother buy me a copy of One Writer’s Beginnings, which she promptly did.  I immediately fell for Welty’s voice and proceeded to tear through her short stories and most of her novels – but Delta Wedding was my favorite.  I read it multiple times in high school, but hadn’t re-read it in years.  I often find myself craving Welty during the dog days of summer, and it was time to dive back into her world of the Yazoo Delta and Dabney Fairchild’s wedding preparations.

(Image source: Eudora Welty Collection, National Endowment for the Humanities)

The novel begins on a hot September day in 1923.  Nine-year-old Laura McRaven is arriving in Fairchilds, Mississippi, on the Yazoo Delta, aboard a train called the Yellow Dog.  She is en route to attend the wedding of her seventeen-year-old cousin Dabney Fairchild, at Shellmound, the Fairchild family’s plantation.  When Laura arrives, she is met at the station by a gaggle of Fairchild cousins, and is immediately swept back into family life.  The events leading up to Dabney’s wedding are told through a series of vignettes, all of which are gorgeously crafted – Welty is at her best when recording, in minute detail, the incidents of everyday life and the natural landscape.

Grass softly touched her legs and her garter rosettes, growing sweet and springy for this was the country.  On the narrow little walk along the front of the house, hung over with closing lemon lilies, there was a quieting and vanishing of sound.  It was not yet dark.  The sky was the color of violets, and the snow-white moon in the sky had not yet begun to shine.  Where it hung about the water tank, back of the house, the swallows were circling busy as the spinning of a top.  By the flaky front steps a thrush was singing waterlike notes from the sweet-olive tree, which was in flower; it was not too dark to see the breast of the thrush or the little white blooms either.  Laura remembered everything, with the fragrance and the song.

It would be impossible for Welty to focus on every Fairchild – there are so many of them.  So a few characters – Ellen, Laura, Dabney, Shelley, George and Robbie – get the most attention, while others – Battle, the aunts, the younger cousins, baby Bluet – are more sketchily filled in.  As a teenager, reading Delta Wedding for the first time, I was most drawn to Shelley Fairchild.  One year older than the teenaged bride Dabney, marriage couldn’t be further from Shelley’s mind.  She wants to travel and to write, and she is forever finding herself saddled with the little ones – schlepping Laura and India on a mission to inquire about her mother Ellen’s lost brooch, stopping off at the store and forgetting the groceries.

Part of the delight of Delta Wedding, indeed, is that there are so many characters – there is always someone with whom to identify, no matter your stage in life – and there is always a character to draw you in.  I’ve been Shelley, the eldest child longing to flee the nest.  I’ve been Laura, the young visitor, and Robbie, the unwelcome interloper.  (Indeed, on this reading, Robbie touched my heart more than she used to do.)

This time, though, the character who most interested me was Ellen.  Married to the eldest brother – Battle – and lady of the house at Shellmound, Ellen is both of the Fairchilds and apart from them.  To an outsider like Robbie, Ellen is just as much Fairchild as the rest of them.  But there are little droplets of mentions and implications that Ellen is not Fairchild.  It’s repeatedly brought up that Ellen is “from Virginia” and thereby, a little bit “snooty.”  Ellen herself feeds into this – while she has mostly settled down to become a Fairchild baby machine, she can’t help but mention that the “Dabney” china (her family’s) is the good china.  And at one point, she muses about the strangeness of life’s paths, making her the matriarch of a big country family when she is more suited to a bookish life in the city.  (It’s an interesting juxtaposition – Robbie, who has married George, the youngest Fairchild brother, and is living a luxurious life in the city, couldn’t be more discontent with her lot.  Ellen would have thrived there, for all she has made life work at Shellmound.)  I was interested in the contrasts between Robbie and Ellen – both married into the family, but Ellen has been accepted wholeheartedly, if acknowledged as a snooty Virginian, while Robbie is persona non grata.  Why?  Is it because Ellen has been around longer, or because she was from a fancy Virginia family instead of a poor Mississippi family, or because she has made so many Fairchild babies, or because she married eldest brother Battle instead of beloved baby George, or something else?  Was Ellen immediately accepted or did she have to earn her Fairchild stripes?  I could read a whole book about Ellen.

I can’t conclude this review without mentioning the setting – physical and temporal.  As with any book set in the 1920s on a plantation in the deep South, you can expect to encounter racial issues.  There’s not much strife at Shellmound, and I think that’s largely because the characters of color are side characters to this particular narrative.  (Whether or not they should be given a more central place in the narrative is above my pay grade: it’s a story about a wedding in a gigantic family, so maybe Welty just couldn’t cope with any more central characters; several of the family members also get short shrift.)  The characters relate to one another in a fairly standard way and, for the times, it’s nowhere near the most cringeworthy thing I’ve ever read.  It would make this review much too long to address the subject of race relations in classic novels and I’m not sure I am up to taking that topic on, anyway.  Suffice it to say I think there’s value in reading these older works from a contemporary perspective, recognizing that things have improved and there is yet more work to be done, and acknowledging the literary merit apart from the social issues.

This is not a story about race relations – there is much more class tension than race tension.  Both George (with Robbie) and Dabney (with Troy) are considered to have married, or be marrying, “beneath” them and “beneath” the Fairchilds.  Troy has an easier time getting accepted by the family, although none of them are over-thrilled with the match.  Indeed, that class tension is the driving focus of the narrative – something I missed completely when I first read Delta Wedding at sixteen – and is personified in the three in-law characters, who are rather more interesting than the Fairchilds themselves.  Ellen, Troy and Robbie – the ways in which they are similar (not Fairchild) and the ways in which they diverge (pretty much everything else) – represent that class tension between the Fairchilds and the rest of the world.  And of course, Eudora Welty is the writer to explore that, with her telescopic focus on the small details of everyday life.

A brown thrush in a tree still singing could be heard through all the wild commotion, as Dabney and Troy drove away, scattering the little shells of the road.  Ellen waved her handkerchief, and all the aunts lifted theirs and waved.  Shelley began to cry, and Ranny ran down the road after the car and followed it as long as it was in hearing, like a little puppy.  Unlike the mayor’s car that had come up alight like a boat in the night, it went away dark.  The full moon had risen.

Have you read any Eudora Welty?  Which is your favorite?

September!  It doesn’t look like the usual September, that’s for sure.  While the scent of fresh apples and newly-sharpened pencils is in the air – for sure, that hasn’t changed – my kids will not be getting on the school bus this year.  There will be no huddling on tiny chairs at “Back to School Night,” no Halloween parades or holiday concerts, no crumpled art projects in little backpacks.  What there will be instead, for me, is a five-year-old “office mate” sitting next to me, interacting with his classmates on Google Classroom while I try to squeeze work into his math and language arts lessons (Peanut will be doing the same downstairs, at her little desk in the family room next to Steve).  September is a nostalgic month of the year for me every year, as I think back on my own school days.  This year, more than any other, I want to visit books about the way school used to look, and the way it may look again (in some cases).

First of all, when it comes to education, no one is more committed than Malala.  I Am Malala: The Girl who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai, is a stunning memoir of a story that is widely known around the world.  Malala grew up in the Pakistani mountains, the daughter of a progressive father who valued girls’ education – and became a youth advocate for girls’ education herself.  One day, armed Taliban stormed onto a bus, demanded to know which one of the girls was Malala, and then shot her.  In her memoir, Malala – who just graduated from Oxford University – tells the story of her childhood, her horrifying ordeal, and her ultimate triumpg.  All because she wanted to go to school and learn – something that many children take for granted, but many others can only dream.

For something lighter, how about a murder mystery set at a boarding school?  Cat Among the Pigeons, by Agatha Christie, drops Hercule Poirot into the thick of a murder at a girls’ school.  There are missing gems, and tennis, and Poirot solves the crime (of course) in a decidedly squidgy way.  (If you’ve read the book, you’ll likely remember – somewhat uncomfortably – the clue that puts him onto the killer’s scent.)  Like many bookish children, I dreamed of going to boarding school.  Cat Among the Pigeons helped to cure me of that dream.  You’re welcome!

I usually try to profile only books that I’ve read in these posts.  But two that I haven’t – that I’m hoping to get to this month or next – are Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School and Terms and Conditions, both by Ysenda Maxtone Graham and published by Slightly Foxed.  (While I haven’t read these for myself – they’re on my shelf – I’ve heard good things and everything that Slightly Foxed has done has been a winner for me so far, so no reason to think these won’t be.)  Mr Tibbits profiles half a century in English history through the lens of one boys’ school, and Terms and Conditions focuses on the many changes that girls’ boarding schools experienced in the twentieth century, through about 1970.  I will report back!

What are your favorite school books?

The early trains for Liverpool, on Monday morning, were crowded by attorneys, attorneys’ clerks, plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses, all going to the Assizes.  They were a motley assembly, each with some cause for anxiety stirring at his heart; thought, after all, that is saying little or nothing, for we are all of us in the same predicament through life; each with a fear and a hope from childhood to death.  Among the passengers there was Mary Barton, dressed in the blue gown and obnoxious plaid shawl.

Mary Barton was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel – not as polished as North and South (arguably her most famous) or Wives and Daughters (her final, unfinished work), it’s still a poignant, marvelous read.  The novel’s origins are sad: mourning the death of her nine month-old son, Gaskell was contemplating distracting herself with a writing project.  She was planning a historical novel, but was overcome by the idea of the hidden romances and sorrows behind the blank faces that pushed by her in the Manchester streets.

(Image source: The Independent)

It is a pretty sight to walk through a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist’s looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin’s garden of enchanted fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar  No such associations had Barton; yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts to exist. They are the mysterious problem of life to more than him.  He wondered if any in all the hurrying crowd had come from such a house of mourning.  He thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them  But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street.  How do you know the wild romance of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under?

This quote, more than any other, explains why Gaskell chose to write the story of Mary Barton instead of the historical narrative she was planning.  But the novel is also revolutionary: it was one of the first novels to feature a working-class heroine (instead of an upper middle-class or gentry heroine).  Gaskell’s narrative stood for the idea that working-class people have stories that are worth telling.

When the novel opens, times are good.  We first meet Mary with her family – her father, John Barton, and mother, Mary Barton Sr. – on a soft spring day.  The family is out in nature (a contrast with the sooty city life they lead in Manchester) enjoying a rare day of leisure with their good friends, the Wilsons.  The teenaged Mary is blooming like one of the spring flowers they are out enjoying, and the Wilsons’ eldest son, Jem, is captivated by her – but Mary couldn’t be less interested in Jem.

The good times don’t last forever.  Manchester’s textile works lead a volatile existence, and their fates are tied to “the masters” — the mill employers, who set wages and hours, and with that, make the difference between surviving and starving (or “clemming,” as the workers call it).  This being an Elizabeth Gaskell novel, the bad times descend quickly and most of the combined Barton-Wilson clan is in the grave by the time the first half of the book is over.

Meanwhile, both Mary and Jem are growing up.  Jem gets a job in a foundry and works his way up to a supervisory position; Mary finds a place in a dressmaker’s shop.  Her father is determined that she will not become a factory girl, and Mary has no interest in that life.  Yet at the same time, John Barton worries that Mary will become dissatisfied with her life and end up like her mother’s sister Esther, who vanished one evening and broke her family’s hearts.  Mary, however, is young and thoughtless, a flirt, and she soon attracts the attention of a rich young man – the son of her father’s employer.

Yes! Mary was ambitious, and did not favor Mr Carson the less because he was rich and a gentleman.  The old leaven, infused years ago by her aunt Esther, fermented in her little bosom, and perhaps all the more, for her father’s aversion to the rich and the gentle.  Such is the contrariness of the human heart, from Eve downwards, that we all, in our old Adam state, fancy things forbidden sweetest.  So Mary dwelt upon and enjoyed the idea of some day becoming a lady, and doing all the elegant nothings appertaining to ladyhood.

Mary finds herself deeper and deeper in with young Harry Carson, and relying on his good will, she declines a marriage proposal from Jem.  After all, Harry’s mother was a factory girl, and the elder Mr Carson worked his way up to become a mill owner.  Harry is not so above Mary in stature that it’s impossible to consider he might genuinely fall in love with her; money is the main thing that divides them, but their family backgrounds are more similar than it would appear at first blush.  So Mary indulges her fantasies of becoming Mrs Carson and playing Lady Bountiful to her former near neighbors.  But it soon becomes clear that Mr Carson’s intentions are hardly honorable – and Mary discovers that she actually had feelings for Jem all along.  Whoops!

(Image source: Manchester Evening News)

Meanwhile, as Mary works through her romantic tribulations with the dubious help of her similarly inexperienced friend Margaret, John Barton is being swept up in a more macro struggle – that age-old divide (and favorite topic of Gaskell’s) between labor and capital.  Barton is active in his union, and when work at the mills dries up he is impacted by the poverty and misery of his compatriots.  When the employers rebuff the union representatives in their efforts to negotiate, the union decides to take a drastic step – an assassination of someone associated with the employers.

John Barton’s overpowering thought, which was to work out his fate on earth, was rich and poor; why are they so separate, so distinct, when God has made them all?  It is not His will that their interests are so far apart.  Whose doing is it?

The victim is Harry Carson – son of the mill owner.  Mary is secretly a little relieved, because Harry’s attentions had become intolerable to her.  But her relief turns to agony when suspicion immediately falls on Jem Wilson, who was overheard arguing with Harry – over Mary, as it turned out – just a few days before the murder.  Jem is arrested on suspicion, and Mary throws herself into proving his innocence when even their mutual friends are convinced of his guilt.  (I won’t give away the verdict, although if you read the table of contents, you’ll know how the trial turns out even before you read the first line – thanks for that, Liz G.)

Having read other Gaskell works, I can certainly tell that Mary Barton is an earlier effort.  It lacks the balanced complexity of North and South and the humor of Cranford or Wives and Daughters.  It also takes longer to get off the ground than the other Gaskell novels – the action doesn’t really take off until midway through the book (although Gaskell starts killing off characters earlier than that; she’s worse than J.K. Rowling that way).  But once things get going, they really get going – by the time Jem was charged with murder, I was so into the book that I stayed up feverishly turning pages until midnight.

All in all – I loved the fourth Gaskell I’ve read as much as I loved the first three.  With only two novels left (I don’t count the sanitized Life of Charlotte Bronte) I am starting to think I’d better ration.

What’s your favorite Elizabeth Gaskell novel?  I have loved them all, but I think I’m still partial to Cranford.

Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for August, 2020…

Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell – Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel sets the stage for her later works – especially North and South – and fixes on one of her favorite themes: the conflict between labor and capital, between the working classes and their employers.  It’s a revolutionary novel in that its heroine, Mary Barton, is a working-class girl; the novels of the time did not lend much credence to the romances, loves, pain, or joy of laborers and their families.  It’s also vintage Gaskell: a whole mess of people bite it, and if only everyone would just sit down and have tea together, labor and capital could solve all of their problems, I mean, really.  Heh… I really did enjoy this; it was slow-moving for the first half or so, but really picked up speed about midway through the novel, when it turned into a courtroom drama.  Full review (for the Classics Club) to come, so I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for that.

The Fixed Stars: A Memoir, by Molly Wizenberg – I had such mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand, Molly’s writing is as elegant as ever and I flew through the book.  But on the other hand, this felt too personal, to the point that reading it felt voyeuristic.  I know that she put these words out in the world, and that she wanted people to buy her book and read it, and that she got royalties (or at least credit toward her advance) from my purchase of the kindle version, but – still, actually reading about the demise of her marriage, and her sexual awakening as a queer woman, a part of my brain kept nagging me, “This is private.  This is not for you.”  (A separate part of my brain knows it’s important that queer stories are out in the world, and also that no one forced Molly to write and publish this particular book, and she no doubt wanted people to purchase and read it.)  Molly acknowledges that memoir is something of an act of violence to the people in the memoirist’s life, but it also struck me as topsy-turvy that the only “main character” who got to keep some privacy was “Nora,” Molly’s problematic first girlfriend, who gets the coverage of a pseudonym while Molly, Brandon, Ash, and June are all out there with their real names.  (I know it wouldn’t be possible to give Brandon and June pseudonyms; anyone who has read Molly’s other writing already knows about them.)  Molly is clearly holding back a lot of details about her relationship with Ash (understandably, and I think rightfully); Brandon doesn’t always come off very well, but he is an adult who agreed to and supported the project.  But I do wonder how her daughter will feel in ten years, having the demise of her parents’ marriage and these very personal details in print for all of her classmates to read.  Having a blog myself, I have given a lot of thought to how I portray my children; they are a part of my life and so they’re around this space, but I intentionally don’t use their real names or show recent photos of their faces, and I don’t share details (either about them or about myself) that might cause them pain or embarrassment later.  Everyone is different, obviously – what I’m comfortable with isn’t the “right” way or what everyone has to do, and I get that.  I’m not going to clutch my pearls and shout “Think of the children!” – and Molly is clearly a very thoughtful person, who I’m sure considered the ramifications to June of having her parents’ personal tumult in print for all to read, and balanced them against her need to write the story.  Still, permission notwithstanding – I felt a bit like I was pressing my nose against a window, looking in at a family’s pain that didn’t concern me, and I just felt vaguely wrong and weird about that.

Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty – It had been a long time – years – since the last time I re-read Delta Wedding, which was one of my favorite books in high school.  I was definitely worried that it wasn’t going to hold up with my “2020 vision” – would I love it as much as I remembered, or would it be full of cringeworthy moments and dated words about characters of color?  Being a 1923 book, it was of its time, certainly – but race is not the focal point of the story (class is – something I realized for the first time on this read-through) and while Welty’s characters behave like a white Southern landowning family in the 1920s, it could be much worse.  The descriptions of nature and the telescopic focus on a few family members makes this book what it is – a series of gorgeous vignettes, still a wonderful read years after I first picked it up.

The Silver Branch (The Dolphin Ring Cycle #2), by Rosemary Sutcliff – Having loved The Eagle of the Ninth, I had high expectations for the second novel in Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic series about Roman – and later Saxon and Norman – Britain, and they were met and exceeded.  The events of The Silver Branch take place about 200 years after The Eagle of the Ninth and focus on two young Romans – Flavius, a Centurion (and descendant of Marcus Flavius Aquila) and his cousin Justin, a Cohort Surgeon.  When the young men uncover a plot to overthrow the Emperor of Britain, they quickly find themselves neck-deep in intrigue and adventure.  Yay, plotting!  Yay, intrigue!  Yay, battles!  Yay, danger!

Slightly Foxed No. 66: Underwater Heaven, ed. Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood – Figured I’d better get around to the current issue of Slightly Foxed before the autumn issue comes out!  I always enjoy this journal and often come away with a long TBR after reading writers on their favorite books and authors.  I didn’t feel a great compulsion to pick up any of the books that were profiled in the summer issue, this time, but it occurred to me that the journal is almost stronger when that’s the case – because if I’m not interested in the underlying book but still find the essays in the journal to be wonderful reads, worth enjoying for their own sake, the journal must be impressive indeed.

And that’s a wrap on August.  It looks like a light month of reading, but what you don’t see is that I spent considerable time with two Victorian doorstoppers last month.  When I started the month, I was partway into Mary Barton, and that took up a good two weeks to finish.  (So good, though!)  Then I cruised through a few shorter books before picking up The Pickwick Papers.  As of the publishing of this post, I am nearly done with it, so it will appear on September’s (hopefully longer) book list.  But it ate up a lot of reading time in August and into September.  Everything I read in August was well-written and engaging, but there were definite highlights.  The Silver Branch was, I think, my favorite book of the month, and I am so stoked that Slightly Foxed is continuing to publish the series.  Mary Barton was wonderful, too, and I don’t even want to think about the fact that I have only two unread Elizabeth Gaskell novels left.

How was your August in books?