Charlotte Brontë – ‘Jane Eyre’

When I’ve written about Charlotte Brontë previously (on Tales of Angria and The Professor), it has been in the light of Villette, her best novel. It is always such a pleasure to re-read, so sure is it of its ground: how hard it is for shy and sensitive people to find true and reciprocated affection, but how rewarding once the struggle is over. Going back to the earlier novels, it is always surprising to find them less sure of themselves – but they are, and Charlotte seems to have worked her way towards her masterpiece in the same tentative way that its protagonist Lucy Snowe makes her way in the world. Jane Eyre, of course, is her most popular book, but I have never understood why. It is wilder and more single-minded than her other books, but if you want that from a Brontë, Wuthering Heights is probably a better bet. It makes more sense if you flip it around: shyness as a popular subject is almost a contradiction in terms. If the media is constituted of people who aren’t shy, then why would they celebrate a book which evokes so perfectly that condition? But equally, it is not constituted of idiots, so how could they ever be taken in by Mr Rochester?

And, OK, it makes sense too because Jane Eyre is written from the point of view of a fiercely independent woman, whose plain speaking was, at the time it was published, refreshingly provocative (or just provocative, to some). It was noticeable in Tales of Angria that characters were described largely in negative terms, and it is true here too:

Mrs Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. (p. 113)

This is someone Jane likes! Though not someone she could be induced to like very much. The housekeeper at Thornfield Hall (Rochester’s residence, where Jane is to be governess to his ward Adèle) is one of very few people to have shown Jane kindness by this stage in the novel, but she is not influenced into a higher estimation of the lady’s character than is deserved. Prior to this there have been only two characters who have gained Jane’s affection: Helen Burns, the saintly pupil at Lowood, where Jane receives a schooling under the most deprived of circumstances, and Miss Temple, a teacher there, who is a mentor to Jane when she becomes a teacher herself. When she leaves, Jane remarks:

It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was no more. (p. 88)

Which is rather poignant, and an indication that Jane can be fiercely affectionate as well as fiercely independent. The contrast between the way she regards Miss Temple and Mrs Fairfax prefigures the difference in her feelings for Rochester and St John Rivers, to which much of the novel is devoted after Jane leaves Thornfield, about halfway through. St John is a clergyman, of the active, restless variety, bored of life in a small parish and determined to go and do good work somewhere foreign and deprived. He is passionate about this objective, to the extent of denying himself a marriage to someone with whom he is besotted, but which he recognises would preclude his emigration. And indeed his admission into heaven, which he regards as contingent on going to India and saving a quantity of Indians from their poverty-stricken and / or non-Christian ways. He tries to talk Jane into marrying him, so that she can accompany him as a support worker. There is no talk of love on either side, and, because she has some sympathy with his plans, and because she simply can’t imagine loving anyone other than Rochester (to whom she believes she is lost forever), she is almost tempted to agree. But she eventually comes to this realisation:

I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgement. (p. 441)

So – not to yield because of a principle is foolish? It depends on whose the principle is – society’s, or one’s own. Jane is saying nothing new here: she is recognisably still the little girl who unhappily judged her cousins inferior, though they were her only companions, and who stole into Helen Burns’ death bed, so that she would not die alone. The point is that her character has remained constant through all kinds of struggles and tragedies, and the chief trait of that character – strong personal affection – is shown in contrast to St John’s absolute lack of it. He may be a good man (that is what his arguments are supposed to convey, though they are outdated now), and Rochester may be a bad one, but Rochester’s first duty is to the person he loves, rather than the species. This is the basis on which Jane makes her choice.

Watching a (very good) BBC dramatisation of Jane Eyre from 1983 some time ago, one line stood out, and it was good to be able to track it down. It occurs during one of Jane and Rochester’s heated debates, in chapter 11:

I mentally shake hands with you. (p. 141)

Delivered by Timothy Dalton with the utmost earnestness, it is laugh out loud funny. This is not his fault – it is a terrible line. It is certainly not a line of naturalistic dialogue. But Jane Eyre is not a novel in which characters interact naturalistically. It is more a series of dialogues, through which Jane develops her thoughts about independence and interdependence. The characters who share these dialogues are not fleshed out, are not important for anything other than helping Jane make her journey. Rochester seems particularly ridiculous because he is the most prominent. I was a bit harsh in the first paragraph: Jane Eyre is very far from being un-moving, or a bad book. It is an interesting stepping stone, but Charlotte still had to learn to trust other people enough to let them into her fiction: she is the only character here.

Liechtenstein, The Sexual Objects and Peter Parker at Stereo, Glasgow, 27th February

Last month, the impeccably enthusiastic Brogues announced that he had organised a pop show. This seemed, to say the least, a splendid idea. I had no idea who any of the bands were, but when Brogues says pop, you had better believe he means pop. A big thank you to him for putting it on. The next morning, these were the things I could remember...

Two of Peter Parker had polka dot dresses. A third had a cherry coloured bob, shiny and immaculate. A fourth was male, and I forget what he was wearing, but between him and the bob were woven ringing staccato guitar lines that had me thinking of The Royal We, whilst the bob and the foremost polka dot traded call and response pop tunes which were less spiky altogether. Polka dot #2, on drums, stood for the first song (stand up drumming is back in, you know), then sat down. I should really look up their names, but back at A’s the following morning I already seem to have broken the curtains (you pull curtains, right?) and the TV aerial socket, above which hung until recently a small but heavy hardwood African mask. Turning on the laptop would be asking for trouble. But yeah, Peter Parker were fab. Songs were introduced, ‘this is about boys’, ‘this is about girls’, or ‘this is about boys and girls’, and what more can you ask of songs, really? I wish I knew some of them so I had more to say, but this will be getting fixed shortly, I’m sure.

The Sexual Objects are, I believe, something to do with The Fire Engines. From left to right, they had a bass that looked like it had been knocked up in (or out of) an old shed, a red Jazzmaster, a white Jazzmaster, and one of those thick bodied semi-acoustics on which rock ’n’ roll was probably invented. The latter sported by a man who didn’t seem to know whether he was Elvis Presley or George Michael – tall hair, pink / red jacket, white jeans. In fact, Jazzmasters apart, the look of The Sexual Objects was all over the place: Jazzmaster 2 could have played timpani on Berlin, Jazzmaster 1 (at a guess I’d say he was the Fire Engines chap) could have been the only sheriff in town, with maybe a cobra snake for a neck tie. He said hello to ‘the west coast of Scotland... no, the west of Europe’, started rambling about the show being beamed by satellite. ‘Twat!’ exclaimed S., who, having danced delightedly to the whole of Peter Parker’s set (and fuelled by several ciders), was affronted by the intrusion of pretentiousness into proceedings. The first song didn’t help – a folky dirge, sung by the whole band. It wasn’t ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, but that was the general effect. Where did all the pop music go? But they were only fooling with us: from the second song onwards a raucous sleaze oozed. Towards the end of the set the sheriff announced with lazy glee, ‘this one’s called “Full Penetration”’. They got up and used us, it felt good.

Lastly came Liechtenstein, a Swedish three-piece. Rumbling Shop Assistants drums, harmonies. The singer had short blonde hair and a white T-shirt which read ‘Dolly Mixture’. All of which sounds fairly (very) cutesy, but for that kind of band, Liechtenstein are unusually regimented, there is a hardness there too. Would it be lazy to mention The Slits, vocals-wise? And then there is their single ‘Apathy’, which reverses the description I’ve just given: soft as snow, from the sound alone it could easily be a lament for a boy who fell short of perfection. Instead, the lyrics are a subdued renunciation of all things girly: ‘Abolish all cute princesses in pink dresses’ and ‘No gossip no girl talk no trendy catwalk / No spreading rumours no stabbing backs’. It’s an interesting disconnect. I don’t remember them actually playing it, though – the set kicked off with the rowdier ‘Stalking Skills’, and pretty much stuck with that level of energy. Palpably frostier than Peter Parker, but more intense, Renée’s unblinking eyes in the glare of the stage lights the fixed point around which the set revolved. And right at the front of the crowd Brogues danced to it all, grinning. I can’t help thinking that this is not the way gigs normally happen. More, please!

horsemeatpie’s photos

MySpaces: Liechtenstein, Peter Parker, The Sexual Objects

Update: More there is to be, as it says here, or, if you prefer, there. There has a slight edge, for saying ‘Cost: Glasgow!’

Summer Books

These are weirdly similar. I wonder if there is a publishing term for this kind of cover. Tahoma Cockatoo Light, or something. And whether they sell best when it is grey outside.

How Could You Be So Cruel?

Yesterday evening, raking through some old four track tapes retrieved from my parents’ attic over Christmas, looking for one or two missing Planet Sunflower songs which must surely be in this shoebox somewhere. I found the saddest song I ever wrote. Thought it was lost. Christ. Happy Valentine’s Day.

The Long Vacation – How Could You Be So Cruel?

Doris Lessing – ‘The Golden Notebook’

[From a red notebook, written during the course of reading the first half of this novel.]

4^th Jan. Started Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which is helpfully prefaced with instructions on how to review it! There are three standard approaches, apparently, which are never mixed: women’s rights, politics, madness. What fun...

5^th Jan. The first section reads like a demonstration of why authors shouldn’t explain their books. In this section, Molly returns home after a year’s absence and talks to her friend Anna (author of the notebooks which constitute The Golden Notebook). Is her absence what has caused her 20-year-old son Tommy to become so unhappy? His father Richard joins them, to discuss what is to be done. He is a hot-shot businessman, Molly a semi-successful actor (i.e. in work, but unable to turn down bad plays), and Anna a writer (one novel published, procrastinating over the second). There is a suggestion that Anna and Richard had a fling whilst Molly was away. Richard and Molly divorced after Tommy was born; he remarried, she didn’t. There are ideological divisions: when they met in 1935 they were all Marxists, involved via pressure groups in the Spanish Civil War. The women remained left-ist, and arty; Richard got a job in the city through his dad, made lots of money. It is absolutely as creaky as it sounds. Worse: Molly and Anna both used to visit the same psychiatrist, and are able to psychoanalyse each other with gestures and arched eyebrows.

11^th Jan. Anna Wulf ponders her one novel, Frontiers of War:

But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. (p. 77)

On the following page she goes further: ‘a longing to become part of dissolution’, ‘nihilism’, and:

The emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime. (p. 78)

13^th Jan. Currently (the ‘Black Notebook’ section) there is a group of communists in Africa, all quite disagreeable. They remind me of the irritating and murderous students in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

17^th Jan.

And you, Ella. You tell the wives of workmen who are all just as good as their masters to use the styles and furnishings made fashionable by businessmen who use snobbery to make money. (p. 196)

This is better. Ella is a fictionalised version of Anna, who works for a low-brow fashion magazine, rather than Anna’s communist publishing firm. This comes from the Yellow Notebook, which is very good on mood, especially the part in which Ella and Paul begin their relationship: she is repelled and attracted by him in turn, and sex is often an event which will cause a swing from one mood to another.

20^th Jan. Back with Anna:

I am ashamed of the psychological impulse that created Frontiers of War. I have decided never to write again, if that is the emotion which feeds my writing.

At her communist publisher’s, she has the job of reading manuscript submissions, and:

I read this dead stuff praying that just once there may be a short story, a novel, even an article, written wholly from genuine personal feeling.

And so this is the paradox: I, Anna, reject my own ‘unhealthy’ art; but reject ‘healthy’ art when I see it. (p. 311)

Her involvement in the Communist Party almost seems calculated to counter her own emotive writing. She lectures on art, disapproving of the move from the communal art of the Middle Ages to the personal art of the Twentieth Century.

From the Blue Notebook:

...who is that Anna who will read what I write? Who is this other I whose judgement I fear; or whose gaze, at least, is different from mine when I am not thinking, recording, and being conscious. And perhaps tomorrow, when that other Anna’s eye is on me, I will decide not to leave the party? (pp 312-13)

The day she arbitrarily decides to record turns out to be the day she leaves the Communist Party, and the day she recognises that her long affair with Michael is over. Writing fixes, crystallises.

[My red notebook ends here, for lack of space. The next one is lime green, which I am slightly regretting – that and bright pink were all the shop had. However, it has nothing to say about The Golden Notebook.]

Doris Lessing’s preface says that once a reader has fully understood an author’s intent, he / she may as well stop reading. By this measure, The Golden Notebook is extraordinarily successful, because having finished it I still don’t know, different possibilities keep suggesting themselves. The writing does improve after the first couple of sections – possibly these are deliberately plain, to reflect Anna’s writer’s block. The ‘Blue Notebook’ section giving an account of that single day is great, for its hyper-awareness, mixing the three themes mentioned in the preface (for the first time in the novel?) in a convincing fictional context. Also terrific is the three-pronged ending, which gives different accounts of the time Anna spends in her flat after her daughter leaves for boarding school. At first she is alone, then a lodger appears and they jump almost immediately into bed, with varying degrees of ennui. The ‘Golden Notebook’ is the strongest of the accounts: Anna’s personality is infected with the insane variability of Saul’s character, and what with the whiskey and the tiger they both drift close to madness. Or rather, it could be madness, but it could also be that unhealthy thing out of which some art, at least, is made, and which if handled carefully can be used to break writer’s block.