Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born (#CCSpin)

"What's good about it?, Vicky thought. He's in love with you and you're in love with somebody who's in love with somebody else--oh, splendid. Perfectly ducky, in fact."

It's that sort of comedy where one generally expects all of those mismatched loves to be resolved in the end. Is that true of this one? Hmm, maybe. The novel a bit leaves us hanging. If you've read it, did you think things were going to work out?

Ethel Carey, Amanda Keeler, and Vicky Havens were three friends at a private girls' school in Ohio. Vicky was the youngest and the pet of the older two. Now Vicky's heart has been broken when her fiancé runs off with her business partner in their small real-estate firm. Can Vicky bear to continue working with the actual Mrs. Turner when she'd hoped to be Mrs. Turner? Everybody in Lakeville is sniggering behind Vicky's back.

So Ethel, born the wealthiest of the three, goes off to New York City to see her friend Amanda, who's made good. Can Amanda do something for Vicky? 

Since school, Amanda wrote a novel, which got boosted into success when she married Julius Evans, a very wealthy New York publisher. Now she's working on the sequel, writing for Julius' magazines, and since the year is 1941, helping with refugees. Amanda's run far away from Ohio; she'd prefer to forget it. But if Amanda sets up Vicky with a studio apartment, she can use it during the day as a love-nest. She's bored with her husband and thinking about her used-to-be.

Will the US get into the war? Seems likely. It's a serious time.

But the novel is funny: 

"But Lakeville was not hometown to Amanda, it was childhood, and childhood was something to be forgotten, like a long sentence in prison."

"She was so accustomed to only go to those places she was known that this anonymity was a new experience for her. She didn't like it."

[After a family squabble.] "Yet their public manners were charming, even to each other, and probably kept in all the finer condition by not being wasted in private."

[Vicky has been crying.] "...she blew her nose so many times you would have thought she had test the instrument thoroughly before permitting it to leave the factory."

Powell says in her diary she started the novel in January of 1941; on May 18th of 1942, she writes:

"Finished novel at 4:30--p. 402."

She sends it off the next day. But a couple of weeks before on April 25th, she wrote:

"I grow dissatisfied with novel--which is not like me. But it is the longest, most expansive book I've ever attempted and I'm afraid I'll not have the actual capacity for handling this big a theme. I still like it and feel cheated that I can't linger more over it and make it richer, which is what it needs. The title ought to be changed to a more provocative one--'Almond Tree Shall Blossom'--not so bad."

I suspect all writers go through such a phase with whatever they're working on and it doesn't necessarily mean much. It doesn't in this case. It's the third Powell novel I've read, and while I liked the other two well enough, this one amazed me.

Wikipedia tells me Amanda is loosely based on Claire Boothe Luce (Luce-ly?) which would make Julius Evans a stand in for Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life.

My Classics Club spin novel this time, and a rousing success.

 

  

 

 

Ossi di Seppia (#HYH25)

Eugenio Montale in his office at the Corriere della Sera

The Agave on the Reef: Sirocco

O rabid sirocco

gale that burns

the parched land's yellowgreen;

and in the sky alive

with pale lights

a few cloud columns pass

and are lost.

Worried hours, vibrations

of a life that flees

like water through the fingers;

unsnared events,

light-shadows, shakings

of the wobbling things of earth;

oh arid wings of air

today I am

the agave that takes root

in the crevice of the rock

and in the algae's arms escapes the sea

that opens its huge jaws and mouths the boulders;

and in the ferment

of every essence, with my furled-up buds

that no longer explode, today I feel

my rootedness as torment.

 

-Eugenio Montale (tr. Jonathan Galassi)

 

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa, Liguria, Italy in 1896 to a well-to-do family, and died in Milan in 1981. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975.

 

His first book of poems was titled Ossi di Seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones") and came out in 1925. Since cuttlefish are a marine invertebrate, a relative to squid and octopus, you might not think they have bones, but what they have is an internal shell, called a cuttlebone in English, osso di seppia in Italian, which they use to control buoyancy. After the cuttlefish dies, these cuttlebones wash up on shore. Montale called his poems ossi, 'bones' suggesting that they were things he found on the Ligurian coast.

 

'The Agave on the Reef' is the first in a series of three poems (I've only typed the one) about winds of the region. The sirocco is the hot wind from Africa; the second poem names the tramontane, the cold wind that blows down over the Alps; the third is the mistral (maestrale in Italian) from the northwest that blows in all that wonderful sunny weather on to the French and Italian riviera. 

 

Montale wrote many more books of poetry, some published abroad during the Fascist era, translations from English, French, and Spanish, and after the war was a regular columnist for the venerable Milan paper Corriere della Sera.

 

I read it in the bilingual edition from Farrar, Strauss that came out in 1998 with translations and notes by Jonathan Galassi:

The Italian:

 

L'agave su lo scoglio

 

Scirocco

 

O rabido ventare di scirocco

che l'arsiccio terreno gialloverde

bruci;

e su nel cielo pieno

di smorte luci

trapassa qualche biocco

di nuvola, e si perde.

Ore prepesse, brividi

d'una vita che fugge

come acqua tra le dita;

inafferrati eventi,

luci-ombre, commovimenti

delle cose malferme della terra;

oh alide ali dell'aria

ora son io

l'agave che s'abbarbica al crepaccio

dello scoglio

e sfugge al mare da le braccia d'alghe

che spalanca ampie gola e abbranca rocce;

e nel fermento

d'ogni essenza, coi miei racchiusi bocci

che non sanno più esplodere oggi sento

la mia immobilità come un tormento.

 

-Eugenio Montale

 

Galassi reproduces the alliteration of the Italian in 'alide ali dell'aria' but doesn't do much with Montale's rhymes. It's easier to rhyme Italian than English, so maybe it would feel less significant in Italian than in English, but I do feel it's a loss: the Italian ends on a rhymed couplet which adds a weight that's not quite there in English. 

 

Embarrassingly enough, I started reading Ossi di Seppia in October for the 1925 Club, but only finished it now. Well, I did try to read the Italian first. Fortunately there's still Neeru's Hundred Years Hence challenge, running until the end of the year, which I will squeak in on:

 

 

 

Twilight

Twilight

Looking across 

The water we are

Startled by a star--

It is not dark yet

The sun has just set

 

Looking across 

The water we are

Alone as that star

That startled us,

And as far

 

-Samuel Menashe

 

Samuel Menashe was an American poet born in New York in 1925 who died in 2011. He was the first recipient of the Poetry magazine's Neglected Masters award, and this Library of America volume was the result.

 

Twilight comes early this time of year and it's a little cold to go down by the lake without a good reason...