Book Review – Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

There are times when no matter how hard we try to determine our own destiny, situations and events beyond our control seem to conspire against us and lead us down paths which we would prefer not to travel and this seems to be the case for the main character in Edith Wharton's (1862-1937) novel, Ethan Frome first published in 1911.

The construction of the novel is surprisingly modern -beginning in cinematic mode with a snapshot of the present before embarking on a longer flashback to the not so distant past. We meet the narrator- a male engineer on business in the aptly named small town of Starkfield who becomes intrigued with Ethan Frome a striking figure but the ruin of a man, stiffened and grizzled to look much older than his fifty-two years. The narrator's curiosity is further aroused when he notes that Frome retains a careless powerful look, in spite of a pronounced lameness and a red gash across his forehead, which we soon learn are the results of a serious smash-up.

At this point his inquisitiveness becomes our own and we thirst for more information, which comes at first tantalisingly slowly in snippets of conversations with a number of individual townsfolk. When the narrator is unexpectedly forced by inclement weather to spend a night under Frome's own roof the tragic story rapidly unfolds as we move back twenty years or more into the past. Frome's tale is intrinsically bound with Zeena, his hypochondriac wife and the attractive younger cousin and "hired girl", Mattie Silver who resides with them in a house where sexual tension is palpable, frustration overpowering, jealousy suffocating and the sense of helplessness overwhelming. These three are fortune's fools, victims of destiny, their despair equally valid, their needs equally viable and all equally desperate in their bid to attain some crumb of personal happiness in their bleak world where a giant elm tree and long harsh winters play just as an important a role as the main characters.

As in many tragedies, from such chaos, order must follow and we wait for Frome to take up the mantle of hero and effect resolution- and wait indeed we must- for bound by high morals and principles; trapped by a heightened sense of responsibility and duty; and emotionally ensnared by love and obligation, Frome struggles to overcome the shackles of circumstance, - thwarted at every turn in his attempts. We empathise with him and our mind races with Frome's to think of all available options and possible solutions before time runs out.

Eventually resolution is reached when Frome finally managing to break the invisible chains that control his life, takes action on a decision which he believes is the only way he can attain what he most desires... but fate grants his wish in the most callous way possible and we are shocked - quite unprepared for the cruel irony of the final scene which at the same time remains strangely and deeply satisfying to the reader. 

A more modern more self- serving, and self-interested audience may dismiss Frome's actions as needless folly indicating that other options were available, and arguing that because of this, Wharton's character suffers a loss of credibility. However, we must take into account the structure and moral fibre of the society at the time, and note that Frome's choices were severely limited and his actions should be judged in historical context. For me the character is a very believable flawed hero complete with human weaknesses who battles against fate only to end up more fully embracing his own destiny.

The sole jarring element of Wharton’s writing is the manner in which the narrator gathers all the necessary details of the story. It seems illogical that he should be able to do so from spending just one night in the Frome household. But by then we have become so captivated by the tension of the conflict, so enthralled in anticipation of the conclusion that for many readers this point would be easily overlooked. 

In any case, Wharton manages to explain it away as logical conjecture, It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story. Happily the vision is endorsed when we return to the present in the closing pages and in no way detracts from a novel, which should be read, if not for pure enjoyment alone then certainly for discussion, thoughtful consideration and debate.

Book Review – Opal-the journey of an understanding heart

Drawing by Merie Strates. 

Book Review – Opal-the journey of an understanding heart

Opal Whiteley opens her diaries and her heart, slips her small hand into ours, and leads us on a gentle journey back into her early childhood, chatting all the while, sharing her feelings and instructing always on the knowledge she has gleaned from the world around her. Reading this touching journal as if standing over her shoulder we relearn what we have forgotten and appreciate what we long ago did overlook.

Whiteley lived in an Oregon lumber camp in the early 1900’s. It is believed that she was orphaned; yet despite living with an adopted family she remained lonely. The precocious young girl took solace in nature, writing her thoughts in crayoned block letters on scraps of paper. It is assumed that the diary was torn to shreds by a jealous sister, but then painstakingly pieced together by Opal several years later to be published in 1920, at which point, it became an overnight sensation 1 and it is easy to understand why.

Her writings at six years of age, afford an unadulterated perception of a child’s world imbued with a deep sense of naivety and wonderment. This is not a retrospective narrative, nor is it a self-indulgent volume of memoirs. Instead it is the ingenuous recording of the experiences of her imaginative mind and the stirrings of her empathetic heart as they occurred moment-by-moment, day-by-day. The continual almost obsessive need for her to journalise ensures that her diary presents as a structured yet lyrical account of daily life in the lumber camp. Voyeuristically, we witness snippets of the intimate lives of young couples, we are close by when two of her young friends die, and we endure with her, cruel punishments at the hands of her adopted mama. We are compelled to read on not so much for the plot (which is restricted to a series of short incidents) but more so to continue the experience of reconnecting with our own inner child.

And so we gladly follow as she goes on adventures with her creature folks; and watch with pleasure as she interacts with the inhabitants of the lumber camp such as the man who wears grey neckties and is kind to mice, the pensée girl with the faraway look, and the girl who has no seeing.

We are enchanted by her unfettered imagination which transforms the mundane into the ethereal, the intangible into tactile and the imagined into concrete.

At night the wind goes walking in the field talking to the earth voices there. I did follow her down potato rows and her goings made ripples on my nightgown.

Today near eventime I did lead the girl who has no seeing a little way into the forest where it was darkness and shadows were. I led her toward a shadow that was coming our way. It did touch her cheeks with its velvety fingers. And now she too does have likings for shadows. And her fear that was is gone.

We are delighted by her affinity for all natural things whether they are personified -

Potatoes are very interesting folks. I think that they must see a lot of what is going on in the earth. They have so many eyes. Too, I did have thinks of all their growing days there in the ground, and all the things they did hear.

Or not personified-

The earthworms are out again. I wonder how it feels to stretch out long and then get short again.

It is all too easy to become lost in Opal Whiteley’s world, seduced by her imagery and touched by her compassion. However her heightened sense of empathy and her ability to express herself so well at so young an age led the public to challenge the authenticity of her writings. Ten months after its publication, her diary at first hailed as brilliant, was considered a hoax. Accused of literary fraud, Opal left for England. In 1948, she was taken to a public mental hospital where she remained until her death in 1992. Since then the question continues to be raised: is the diary a hoax, or the genius of a young girl? 2

We reconsider her journal and are somewhat downcast to discover that perhaps there is something too organised and too literary in the cohesiveness and fluency of the diary. There seems to be too, a sense of her being acutely aware of readers to whom she may well be deliberately showcasing her unusually extensive knowledge of great historical and artistic figures as well as a clear understanding of natural science, Catholic liturgy, European history and French vocabulary. All this is in discord with what we normally expect of a six year old.

At points, her writing gives the impression that it has been tailored to meet the tastes of an adult audience, with allusions to the romantic pastoral scenes and what seems to be a deliberate harking back to Victorian sentimentalism:

Lola has got her white silk dress that she did have so much wants for. It has a little ruffle around the neck and one around each sleeve like she did say. She said she would stand up and stretch out her arms and bestow her blessing on all the children like the deacon does- but she didn’t. She didn’t even raise up her hands. She stayed asleep in that long box the whole time the children was marching around her and singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” She did just lay there with her white silk dress on and her eyes shut and her hands folded and she was very still all the time. Her sister did cry.

The juxtaposition of innocently presented observations with those which appear to carry sophistication and controlled irony leaves the reader even more uneasy and sceptical.

I remember the first time I saw Larry and Jean and the bit of poetry he said to her. They were standing by an old stump in the lane where the leaves whispered. Jean was crying. He patted her on the shoulder. He said, “There, little girl, don’t cry. I’ll come back and marry you by and by.’ And he did. And the angels looking down from heaven saw their happiness and brought them a baby real soon- when they had been married most five months, which is very nice, for a baby is such a comfort.

We wonder why she responds to the deaths of two of her young friends; Lola and the blind girl (who perished terrified and tragically alone trying to escape her burning home) in the oddly detached “uncomprehending” manner of an innocent child, yet she mourns the death of Michael Raphael, “the great tree that I love,” with deep awareness.

We note inconsistencies in her spelling that hint at contrivance (for example, physiology is accurately printed but scrutinising charmingly phonetically misspelt as screw tin eye sing). Such misspellings seem to occur only when there is an opportunity for play between puns and homonyms. Other examples include invest tag ashuns, pumpadoor, pit tea, adoors and (my favourite) cal lamb of tea. 

There are numerous examples of what could be regarded as calculated humour in the guise of child being unaware of the implication of her words:

I did look out the front window. There are calf tracks by our front door. Elizabeth Barrett Browning waited yesterday while I did get her sugar lumps. I think she will grow up to be a lovely cow. Her mooings are very musical and there is poetry in her tracks. She does make such dainty ones. When they dry up I dig them up and save them. I take them out of the drawer and look at them and think: this way passed Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

One wonders if a not so young Whiteley was playing cat to the not so sacred cow of Barrett!

This is enough to make even the most ardent admirer and supporter of Opal Whiteley to at least pause to consider the real possibility of deception, but then we cannot resist the seductive pull of her sentiment nor can we decry the enticing warmth of her words:

 I saw a silken cradle in a hazel branch. It was cream with a hazel leaf halfway around it. I put it to my ear and I did listen. It had a little voice. It was not a tone voice. It was a heart voice. While I did listen, I did feel its feels. It has lovely ones.

There is no denying that these are the delicate words of an understanding heart. It is up to the individual reader to decide how old that heart was when they were written and if it really matters. I for one am more than happy to take the journey with that heart regardless of its age, over and over again.

1 Biographical note: Opal the journey of an understanding heart adapted by Jane Boulton 1984

2 © 1995 September Productions, Inc. ISBN 0-914101-02-1

My Not–So–Portable Typewriter

 

Op-shops. I’m addicted. I have been op-shopping ever since I can remember. Back in my day we called them junk shops. I have my favourite shops but one that holds a special spot in my heart is the op-shop in Victoria Crescent, Abbotsford. It was literally just down the road from where I grew up, in Gipps Street, Collingwood. As a newly arrived immigrant, my mother would often shop there, taking my baby brother and me with her. My family along with the majority of the neighbourhood relied on the charitable organisation that ran the store for all our clothing and household goods.

I loved that store. I remember it as a huge warehouse lined with rows of wooden crates. It was nothing like the orderly op-shops of today. To enter that store was to embark on a veritable treasure hunt. We may have called them junk shops, but more often or not there were real bargains to be found. In those days, there was no pre-sorting of items. Mixed in with the rags, the broken kettles and the lumpy mattresses were items of real value. Mum would buy what she needed and it was not uncommon for her to return to our one – bedroom worker’s cottage with a valuable antique or two, tucked in her basket. Of course back then we didn’t have a clue about their real worth. They were bought for practical purposes. Many of the items were replaced over the years but many survived, like the shaving mug pictured here. 

Accompanying my mother on her frequent visits I couldn’t help but to develop a taste for antiques and in particular the thrill of hunting for them. As I grew older I made it a point to return to my old hunting ground. On one particular visit, back in 1976, I found an old typewriter. I fell in love with it. The price was $12, a small fortune for a student living away from home, but I couldn’t resist it. I carried it home in a cardboard box, taking a train and a bus, then walking one kilometre to the house I shared with other students. My housemates thought it was pretty cool but they thought I was mad for buying it: not so much for the amount of money I had spent but rather for the fact that I had carried it all the way home from Collingwood to Regent. And I don’t blame them. It was supposed to be the portable typewriter of its day, but I can tell you now there was nothing portable about it. Writing about it now I am curious about how much it actually weighs.

Okay, I have just finished weighing it…. Would you like to guess? I thought maybe 5 kilos but it is actually 15 kilos! And to think just today I was complaining about having to lug my laptop around!

Perform Don't Tell

Image sourced at http://www.akbarstories.com/about.html

Both my parents were story tellers. They weren’t readers. They didn’t have much in the way of formal education. But they did tell stories. My mother’s stories were about animals, folk tales full of morals and lessons to be learnt, very different to the stories my father told. My father liked to recount his real life experiences. He especially liked to talk about the time that he was attacked by a dog. The first time he told this story he stuck to the facts.

            He had been sent to the local butcher to collect the family’s meat. His family had been lucky that year, their only ewe had given birth to twins. One lamb had been set aside for breeding but the other had been fattened for the table. My father was on his way back home, arms full of parceled lamb, when the attack occurred. The dog had rushed up to him and had jumped onto his legs to sniff at the meat, almost knocking my father off his feet in the process. My father had been lucky enough to keep his balance and had the presence of mind to give it a swift kick before taking to his heels and racing home, safely delivering the meat to the arms of his waiting mother.  

            Over time the story changed. Eventually, it was no longer one dog but a pack of wolves that had attacked my father. Twenty of more of them had come racing down the mountains lured by the smell of fresh kill. The leader of the pack was the first to reach him. It sprang into the air and pounced upon my poor father sinking its fangs deep into his leg. My father fell to the ground and as he did so, two of the legs of lamb slipped from their parcels. Wasting no time, my father picked them up, one in each hand, and using them as clubs he began to beat the wolf about the head. The other wolves seeing their leader thus conquered, tucked their tails between their legs and fled into the far valley, never to be seen again.

            At the end of the story my father would roll up his trouser leg and point to his scars. My brother and I would lean in for a closer look and ooh and ahh. But the truth of the matter was that there were no scars to be seen.  But it wasn't important. So what if he embellished his story. So what if he left out facts and changed the details. It was not so much what he said that mattered, it was how he told the story.

            He left out the boring bits. He prolonged the exciting parts. He raised his voice when the story became exciting and whispered when it became intense. He waved his arms and kicked his legs. He smiled, he frowned, he snarled and whimpered. He made us feel as if we were there as if it was us fighting off the wolves. He knew how to draw us in. 

My father was a great story teller. But thinking back on it now, I realise that my father did more than tell stories, he performed them.