book-review

Lillian Fishman on Sally Rooney on the Relative Value of Experience

“This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

Why did no one else find this proposition shocking? It was such a clear transgression against the entire prevailing ethos of young womanhood (at least in liberal contexts). Critics were concerned with whether Eileen’s happy ending with Simon constituted a more regressive romantic ending than we’d seen in Rooney’s prior novels, but there was no preoccupation with this regret on Eileen’s part. Is that because one is liable, in extreme love, to suddenly wish all kinds of self-negating and previously inconceivable things? Did we read this and think we knew better: that when Eileen grows accustomed to her marriage, she’ll be glad that she had the chance to grow up among her friends before she and Simon came together? Or maybe this is the essential quality which separates a romance from a novel: in a romance a woman must be rescued from circumstances which are sad, inadequate, grief-filled, wasteful. Perhaps a romance is less powerful if it acknowledges all those other little placeholders and consolation prizes (friends, work, art) which we pretend can make us balanced and happy.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-157673192?source=queue

Trollopian Biographical Hijinks

From John Sutherland’s review article in the LRB 30+ years ago:

“One of the clinching confirmations of Anthony’s account of his wretched schooldays came from Sir William Gregory, who was at Harrow with him. On reading An Autobiography, Gregory recalled that Trollope was

‘a big boy, older than the rest of the form, and without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met. He was not only slovenly in person and in dress, but his work was equally dirty. His exercises were a mass of blots and smudges. These peculiarities created a great prejudice against him, and the poor fellow was generally avoided … I had plenty of opportunities of judging Anthony, and I am bound to say, though my heart smites me sorely for my unkindness, that I did not like him. I avoided him, for he was rude and uncouth, but I thought him an honest brave fellow. He was no sneak. His faults were external; all the rest of him was right enough. But the faults were of that character for which school boys would never make allowances, and so poor Trollope was tabooed, and had not … a single friend … He gave no sign of promise whatsoever, was always in the lowest part of the form, and was regarded by masters and by boys as an incorrigible dunce.’

Mullen and Hall quote this in full as clear corroboration that Trollope’s time at Harrow was ‘torture’. Super quotes Gregory selectively, so as to give a quite different impression:

‘Living as he did with only one parent and that a negligent one, Anthony was ‘the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met’, not only in person and dress, but also in his work: ‘His exercises were a mass of blots and smudges,’ as William Gregory of Coole Park, near Gort in Galway, recalled; yet Gregory rather liked him. Though rude and uncouth, ‘I thought him an honest, brave fellow. His faults were external; all the rest of him was right enough.’ (Many years later, Gregory’s widow was to befriend William Butler Yeats at Coole Park.)’

In the section that Super suppresses, Gregory declares quite unequivocally: ‘I did not like him.’ There is no doubt as to what this means. Yet, by judicious quotation, Super can turn this upside down and assert, ‘Gregory rather liked him,’ sketch a Richmal Cromptonish picture of schoolboy Anthony, and then change the subject by dragging the Yeats red herring across the reader’s path.”