literature

(Image from NYPL Digital Gallery)

I've just begun reading Nancy Mitford's essay collection The Water Beetle and have learned that this author's name can be added to the list of notable needlewomen who contributed to the World War I effort.

In "Blor," the first essay in this collection, she recollects how she crocheted for the cause:
"I was soon sitting like a tricoteuse, on the balcony of Grandfather Redesdale's house in Kensy High Street, crocheting an endless purple scarf while the troops marched by on their way to France. (There was no khaki wool to be had so early in the war--you took what you could get.)"

Soon after, she apparently obtained a supply of khaki yarn:
"I fell in love with Captain Platt in my father's regiment, an important General of the next war, and crocheted endless pairs of khaki mittens for him--I am not sure that they were inflicted on him. In any chase, all this crocheting was the nearest I ever got to killing an enemy, a fact which I am still regretting."

In 1914, Nancy Mitford would have turned just ten years old. To learn more about the life of Nancy Mitford, you can read books about her that the Library has at the Humanities & Social Sciences Research Library or those available for checkout at the branches.

With only a few notable exceptions, I haven’t been very lucky with theatrical productions of Shakespeare. Of course, I’ve seen the Olivier and Branagh movies and some fine BBC productions, but film isn’t really theatre. In the theatre, especially here in New York, bad Shakespeare generally outweighs good Shakespeare. The problem with these productions, I find, usually stems from a distrust of Shakespeare’s language, either of the audience’s ability to understand it, or of the actors to speak it. I’ve seen the tragedy, Timon of Athens, played with irrelevant slapstick stage business fit for the Marx Brothers. I’ve seen a production of The Merchant of Venice, which contains subtle hints of homosexuality, embellish that subtext by dressing its characters in day-glo robes and platform shoes, like bit players in The Rocky Horror Show, and having them mince about in degradingly stereotypical fashion. I once even saw a Royal Shakespeare Company version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Titania, while speaking some of the most sensual love poetry ever, was lying on her back using her bare foot to massage Bottom intimately, driving him to eye-rolling ecstacy, as if the language weren’t already making enough of an erotic point. (Unfortunately, I did not see Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart in their recent appearances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which I heard were wonderful; before I could muster myself to making the trip to Brooklyn, all tickets had disappeared.)

One day last year, as I was walking home from work, so wrapped up in my own furiously careening thoughts that I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but the general direction my feet were taking me, I found myself momentarily halted in the middle of a crowd alongside Gramercy Park. As I looked around, it dawned on me that the men in the crowd were all wearing fedoras, like 1950s Madison Avenue executives, most of the women wore long pleated skirts to the knee and some had gloves on, and at the same time I realized that all the cars parked on the street were vintage models I remembered from my childhood. This prompted an eerie moment of disorientation before I realized that I had stepped into the middle of a movie shoot, in this case Revolutionary Road, based on the novel by Richard Yates. I clearly remembered the story of Frank and April Wheeler, whose lives in 1955 suburban Connecticut become inexorably and tragically unglued, but was strangely distressed to learn that a book by an author who was always sort of a secret treasure of mine was being given the big-time Hollywood treatment. Soon, I imagined, I’d be spotting people on the subway holding movie tie-in paperbacks with photos of Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the cover. Yes, great books are meant to be shared--but the act of reading them is inherently a private one, the emotions they engender are deeply personal, and I confess to a smug satisfaction in keeping certain books to myself.

It isn’t even that Yates is so much of a secret any longer. At the time of his death in 1992 he was out of print, virtually forgotten, his name and books known only to a select and cultish group of readers and a few admiring fellow writers. Much of this neglect was due to the fact that these novels and stories are not comfortable reading. Yates knows who you are: your weaknesses and cruelties, the humiliations you receive and inflict, even the lies you tell yourself in order to get through your day. His fiction is fashioned without a hint of contrivance or fabrication, wherever absolute truthfulness will lead, no matter how painful.

This giant could learn a thing or two about dapper dressing from Mr. Awesome. (Image from NYPL Digital Gallery.)

Awesome is the title of the newest book by Jack Pendarvis, which has just been published. It is Mr. Pendarvis's first novel, and, as I was reading it this past weekend, I began to suspect that the author might have craft sympathies. Why, you ask? Because handmade habits crop up again and again throughout this riotous tall tale of a self-involved giant who embarks on a cross-country quest for love. The resulting story is bawdy and unsentimental, filled with cannily precise humor that begs to be read aloud, to be performed.

The following handmade bits make appearances in Awesome:
The giant protagonist (giant in stature and ego) plans a visit to "a hub of recreational sewing" in search for a needle in a haystack. He also meets an artisanal cheesemaker who sells craft supplies to "sewing aficionados" on eBay. And throughout, he makes robots, fashions a "mighty wagon" to transport his collection of treasures, and designs his own car. Beekeeping, mosaic repair, "underground knitting culture," homemade zines, and a pair of giant trousers fashioned from some circus tents all have cameo roles in this novel as well.

Mr. Pendarvis's two earlier books, both collections of short stories, are available for borrowing. The Library doesn't yet have Awesome, but I'm confident that we will soon.

To learn more about Jack Pendarvis, visit his blog.

(Perhaps our heroine should have knitted for herself! From the NYPL Digital Gallery.)

Leave to it P. G. Wodehouse, comic genius and creator of The Inimitable Jeeves and Wooster, to bring levity to my growing obsession with wartime knitters. Lately I have been reading The Clicking of Cuthbert, a collection of Wodehouse’s golf tales. And let me add here: even if you, like me, know nothing of golf, you can still embrace these comedies set among the niblicks and mashies. Included in this volume is a cautionary tale about two rival golfing men, one stout and one lean, who attempt to guess which of them is favored by a certain young lady by studying the size of the item she is knitting. The assumption that they make is that she’s knitting for one of them. Of course, since this tale is by Wodehouse nothing turns out as these golfing gallants might expect. And Wodehouse includes the following warning, concerning the risks of amateur knitting:

“With amateur knitters there must always be allowed a margin for involuntary error. There were many cases during the war where our girls sent sweaters to their sweethearts which would have induced strangulation in their young brothers.”

If Wodehouse’s humor is your style, then check out NYPL's holdings for this prolific writer, musician, and essayist. A quick author search for him (Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville), 1881-1975.) will point the way. On that note, toodle pip!