Kiraly

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, which is actually a reread, which I realized fairly early on when the foppish country house owner explains that he’s staffed the place with murderers who have served their time. Just oncers, no more dangerous than the average man on the street, and anyway how else is he supposed to staff a country house given the servant problem in 1970s Britain? But I kept going, because Ngaio Marsh is always a good time, and also this book prominently features Troy who just happens to be at the country house to paint said foppish owner when the murder occurs… A Troy book is always especially a good time.

Maud Hart Lovelace’s The Trees Kneel at Christmas is set in Park Slope, where one of my friends lives, so every few pages I was shrieking “I know that place! I’ve crossed that street!” So naturally I loved the book, haha. Our heroine Afifi hears a story from her grandmother about how the trees kneel at Christmas back home in Lebanon, and becomes determined to walk to Prospect Park at midnight on Christmas Eve to see if the trees kneel in America, too.

I checked out Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1953 American Folksongs for Christmas purely because it was illustrated by Barbara Cooney, but found it unexpectedly fascinating. Seeger (stepmother of Pete Seeger) was, among other things, a collector of folk music, and this book is full of songs I’ve never even heard of, from the tradition of all-night Christmas Eve church singalongs, often in the South, where people would gather and sing till dawn.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Tasha Tudor’s Take Joy, which is a compilation of Christmas stories/poems/carols etc illustrated by Tudor. The second story is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the world’s saddest pine tree. In the woods, the pine is too entirely focused on growing bigger (big enough to be a Christmas tree!) to ever feel happy. Then it’s cut down to be a Christmas tree, and it’s taken to a house and covered with ornaments and candles, and it’s all very strange and confusing, but the pine tree thinks that it will be able to enjoy these celebrations once it gets used to them… except of course its life as a Christmas tree lasts for just one night, and then it’s tossed in the attic and dried out for firewood.

What I Plan to Read Next

As I feared, I’m already running low on Christmas chapter books. However, Christie has a Poirot Christmas book and a Miss Marple that’s set at Christmas (although not perhaps a Christmas Book), and I have been meaning to to a Miss Marple, so…

If you have any other classic mystery Christmas recs, let me know!

Naturally I’ve decided that this is the year to rewatch some best-beloved Christmas movies, so I kicked off the season with The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring Dan Stevens as a charming but moody Charles Dickens as he scrambles to write A Christmas Carol in time for the Christmas rush in order to save his tottering finances.

This is such a fun movie. I always love a period piece, and I love Dan Stevens, and I love movies about creating art of any kind (if it’s well done, which it isn’t always…), and this one has such a good balance of seriousness and humor.

On the serious side, we have the demons of Dickens’ childhood coming back to haunt him, especially in his difficult relationship with his father, to whom he is far too similar for comfort. He inherited his father’s charm, his taste for the high life, his gift for performance - and he’s afraid he’ll follow his father’s example by running his family into debtor’s prison with his extravagant spending. A new house! All remodeled! A crystal chandelier and a mantelpiece of Carrera marble!

Unlike his perpetually sunny father, Dickens also has darker moods, where the charm gives way to abrupt outbursts of rage. He stalks around his study in the middle of the night making a racket when composition isn’t going well, apparently unaware that he’s keeping the whole house up. He snaps at his wife, sends away a long-time friend, fires a servant girl - then in the morning demands to know why the servant girl is gone. “You have no idea,” Mrs. Dickens tells him, on the verge of tears but displaying all the self-control Charles lacks, “how hard it is to live with you.”

(I’m happy to report the servant girl shows up again, and is of course rehired. I sort of suspect that the housekeeper keeps these impetuously fired servants in an out of the way corner for a day or two just in case Dickens didn’t really mean it.)

But this is not a grim study of a historical figure’s dark side. There are so many wonderful funny bits, too. In his good moods, Dickens is incredibly charming and funny - you can see why all these people put up with his darker side, just because the lighter side is such a delight.

I love Trollope as the guy in the club who always comes over to commiserate (gloat) when someone receives a bad review. Those cruel reviewers, claiming that Martin Chuzzlewit was “dull, vapid, and vulgar” (which Trollope quotes from memory). “I didn’t think it was vulgar,” Trollope assures Dickens, who is looking for an exit, but fortunately Trollope sees someone else who just got a bad review and scuttles off to crow. I mean sympathize.

And I loved how the Christmas Carol characters start appearing to Dickens. As he gets deeper into composition of the book, they start following him around. There’s an especially funny bit where Dickens looks out a window - he’s trying to avoid the book because he’s struggling with the ending - and the characters are all standing in the street below. Mrs. Fezziwig waves a handkerchief at him.

Also, I covet Dickens’ book-lined study, with a little half-staircase up to a mezzanine level with more books. Why is the study built like that? Who can say? Possibly on purpose to be charming, and charming it absolutely is.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Forever Christmas, an account of Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Cottage, with absolutely luscious pictures of Tudor making the yearly Advent wreath (hung from the ceiling with crimson satin ribbons from her parents’ wedding!), decorating gingerbread cookies for the tree (cut fresh from the forest and lit with candles), dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh…

Just gorgeous. Two of my life dreams are to ride in a sleigh and see a Christmas tree actually lit with candles.

And I popped back to the archives for Katherine Milhous’s The First Christmas Crib, which is not (as I expected) an account of Jesus’s birth, but rather a recounting of the first Christmas creche, created by Saint Francis of Assisi. Older Christmas picture books tend to be more religious than the newer ones, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does slightly, just because overall the older Newbery books were not particularly religious. Christmas books were the last outpost for a rearguard action, perhaps.

What I’m Reading Now

Ruth Sawyer’s holiday story collection The Long Christmas, illustrated by our friend Valenti Angelo of Newbery fame. The book was first published in 1941, and although Sawyer doesn’t directly reference the war in the introduction, she is very conscious of the need for a light in the darkness, a repetition of the message “peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then the first story is about Satan rising in the fields of Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’s birth, intent on storming the stable and killing the baby messiah, but his evil plan is thwarted when the archangel Michael descends from heaven and vanquishes him in pitched battle.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got my eyes on Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year.

On one of troisoiseaux’s recent posts about a nun memoir, someone linked an article about a different nun memoir: Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World after Twenty-Eight Years in the Convent.

As Baldwin went into the convent in 1914 and emerged in 1941, I knew instantly that I had to read it. What an absolutely huge period of social and technological change to miss! Baldwin is astonished by modern underwear, the wireless, wartime shortages, and masses and masses of people who have become famous since she went into the convent: Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence… Right up to the end of the war she keeps clanging up against her ignorance of so many things that everyone else takes totally for granted.

However, as interesting as I found all the details about social change, the parts I found most fascinating were Baldwin’s descriptions of life in the convent. I’ve read about early twentieth-century social changes before, although not quite from this angle, but the convent was totally new, in a “I wouldn’t make it five minutes as a novice” kind of way. Bells, bells, bells, ringing at intervals all day and all night, telling you to move from one occupation to another, stopping mid-stitch if that’s when the bell rings, lengthy sung prayers every day, every scrap of behavior governed by the Rule. There’s a correct way to sit, stand, eat, speak, and presumably breathe.

It’s particularly interesting because, although Baldwin left the convent, she still has faith in Catholicism and the concept of monasticism. She’s outside the convent but still “inside,” if you will, the belief system, so she’s particularly good at explaining the ideas behind an enclosed convent: humans were created to adore God and that therefore a life spent in adoring God is profoundly unselfish and also useful, because usefulness doesn’t mean first and foremost serving other people but serving God.

Unfortunately for Baldwin, most of her interlocutors aren’t willing to listen. It’s not just that they disagree (I certainly was going a bit bug-eyed over this order of priorities), but that they’re not even interested in trying to understand. And she’s never the one who brings up the whole nun business! People just tell Baldwin, the ex-nun, their opinion that nuns are selfishly hiding away in convents when they should be getting married or having families or building careers or CONTRIBUTING to the world.

Even if you think that, why would you tell this to an ex-nun unprompted? Were these people born in barns? But maybe they think that Baldwin, having left the convent, will agree.

But Baldwin does not, and she tries to explain the theory of the cloistered nun. Her interlocutors “listen” (read: sit in silence without taking any of it in) and then reiterate their original opinion.

So if Baldwin still believes, why did she leave the convent? Well, she believes in God, and Catholicism, and the concept of vocation, but has realized that she personally does not have a vocation. As she explains it, when she first decided she wanted to be a nun, she didn’t stop to ask herself if she actually had a calling. “I wanted to be a nun; it followed, therefore, as the night the day, that God must have chosen me.” (Some of my students who want to be doctors have the same attitude, insofar as you can have a thoroughly secular version of this belief.)

All through the year of her noviceship, and the five or six years of probation that followed, she continued in this willful confusion between “wanting to be a nun” and “being called to be a nun.” Only after ten years in the convent does she realize she’s made a horrible mistake.

And then she stuck it out for eighteen more years! The same pigheadedness that led her to decide wanting to be a nun meant she must have a vocation also kept her from throwing in the towel for nearly two decades after realizing she didn’t.

The tone of the book is generally pretty sprightly, a sort of quizzical madcap adventure, an Edwardian Rip Van Winkle awakens in World War II. But there is an undercurrent of tragedy, too, which sometimes breaks the surface in a brief lament. If Baldwin had left the nunnery at 31, when she realized she had no vocation, she might still have built a life for herself. But in staying so long, she missed everything: marriage and children, yes, but also the chance to build a career, or even just acquire the job skills that would suit her for any kind of war work.

As it is, she can only bumble from war job to war job. After the war she retires to a cottage in Cornwall, which is certainly a happy ending of a kind. But what a shame she didn’t change direction at once when she realized she was on the wrong path.