Going Back to Go Forward: The L-Shaped Room

There wasn't much to be said for the place, really, but it had a roof over it and a door which locked from the inside, which was all I cared about just then. I didn't even bother to take in the details -- they were pretty sordid, but I didn't notice them so they didn't depress me; perhaps because I was already at rock-bottom. 

Call it a slump. A reading slump? A blogging slump? A blogging about reading slump? It feels the former. For a few months I've been 'auditioning' books, or rather skimming (i.e. reading about four chapters or hitting the 40% mark on my Kindle), trying to find a book to latch onto, that ~calls~ to me. I'm usually not this picky, not this indecisive, or take this long to read anything, but this year began...confused. Freak snowstorms, insurrections, vaccination drama, personal illnesses...my body and mind just can't settle this year as I cautiously emerge from a quarantined cave....thus I'm distracted, slumping along, looking for lit stimulation. 

 

To get back in the groove of reading (and blogging about said reading), I decided to keep it simple. Back to a 'simpler' time, a decade ago, back when I first joined GoodReads (!) and browse the earliest additions to my e-bookshelves. Lynne Reid-Banks' The L-Shaped Room was one of the first books I added to my to-reads list when I joined. Reasons? I had just seen the 1962 film, starring Leslie Caron and Brock Peters, and wanted to read the source material. Simple. At the time, I know I was intrigued that British author Lynne Reid-Banks wrote it considering she wrote The Indian in the Cupboard series, which I read eons ago in elementary school. It always interests me when authors genre hopscotch throughout their careers, and this was quite the hop. 

The L-Shaped Room has very little in common with the Cupboard series (well, except for its focus on main characters in confined domains...). Published prior to sixties getting its swing on, The L-Shaped Room was a runaway hit, the starting point for author Reid-Banks' writing career, and a memorable addition to the "kitchen sink" realism genre. "Sink" tales tackled the 'taboo' topics concerning the working class poor, and an emerging counter-culture of young British angst at the close of the 1950s (this a much more gracious generational cultural acknowledgment than the usual lambasts us Millennials get...). For its time The L-Shaped Room was quite a groundbreaking narrative as it challenged conventional ideals of womanhood, sexuality, and childbirth, broadening the conversations when most spoke of them in hushed tones. Further diverging was its "kitchen sink" voice. Here we're not aware of the thoughts of the usual angst-riddled guy, but rather a young angsty girl --- an unmarried-pregnant-after-her-first-sexual-encounter angsty girl --- a voice that crackles on the pages with all the frustration, fear, regret, and uncertainty in its timbre.

While today we barely bat an eye over a teenaged/unmarried young girl being pregnant (this unless there was some nefarious, criminal reason why she is with child...) as we have celebrities procreating without bling on the ring finger, and have reality TV shows revolving around the daily drama of teenage mothers, the stigma of rearing a child solo as a woman was often a source of stringent shame and judgement in the mid-20th Century. It was something that you just did not flaunt. To shield such 'shame', a lot of single mothers pretended to be married or widowed. Our heroine Jane plays a similar act, and it's how she ends up in the l-shaped room, as it's the one place that can swallow her secret wholly.

I Capture The Blue Castle

L.M. Montgomery does something refreshing with The Blue Castle: she writes the anti-romance story.

Um, let me dial down that sweeping statement just a bit...

This is a romance story, straight up. There is passion, flushes of cheeks, silent stares, dinners that look out on a enchanting lakeside landscape, the archetypal brooding, enigmatic mountain man that can blow a back out and chop a tree with ease (and who in my mind looked liked a rugged Henry Cavill...rowr). It's riddled with all the romance book clichés that conjure up wistful, windswept cover women, promises of a love affair to end all love affairs, and "heaving bosoms". Still, even sainted with these hallmarks, The Blue Castle is the type of romance story that doesn't fuss in the proverbial as it not only deals with matters of the heart, but also concerns itself with how the heroine finds love within.

For a book written in 1926, set in a time before World War I, it was a pretty bold choice to have a heroine who is 29 years old, unmarried, and loathing it. Women aren't supposed to show this on their face, no, they're supposed to grin and bear the spinsterhood, be the subservient shut-in. Valancy Stirling is a archetype character that doesn't want to accept such complacency, and I already love her for this.

Blue Castle was Montgomery's first novel written for adults, and its obvious that Valancy Stirling is no Anne Shirley, L.M. Montgomery's most iconic literary creation. She's jaded and cynical, bereft of hope and just plain miserable, relegated to being the spinster of her family and seeing no prospects for her future. She lives with an overbearing mother, and whiny elder cousin who hover over her like an infantile invalid, and dictate her daily existence. tl;dr: they are insufferable. Her other family members are equally insufferable, with one creepy uncle (isn't always there always that one creepy uncle?) who makes her the butt of his sexist and lame jokes, all while holding the rest of the Stirlings hostage with his ample will if they dare so challenge his opinions. Oh, and to add to the #firstworldproblems, Valancy is often compared to her beautiful (but dingbat) cousin, Olive whose simple existence frustrates Valancy because why is always about Marsha, Marsha, Marsha?!?

For this, Valancy is truly living in a private, socially claustrophobic hell, as she has resigned herself to never living for herself and living out her days unloved and untouched by a man, even though she desires such. Her only escapes are the nature books of a John Foster whose prose Valancy knows by heart --- this to the chagrin of her mother who finds them "racy reads" (cause oak trees make one horny?) --- and in dreams of a "blue castle", a fictitious place where she can be free to be the woman she wishes to be.

"They never knew that Valancy had two homes–the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women–herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle."

These escapes to this imagined "blue castle" bring some ease to Valancy in her lonely hours, but once departed from them Valancy begins to feel chest pains and becomes worrisome to their cause. Not wanting to involve her family, she take matters into her own hands to visit in secret Dr. Trent, a noted heart specialist, who lives in the same (fictional) Ontario town of Deerwood as the Stirlings, and who has been denounced by her family as a no-nothing "quack". Seeing Dr. Trent only provides a devastating blow of news for Valancy, but such news allows her to shed her conventional constraints and truly live life for herself, and well, "do crazy shit".

Love Is A Battlefield

Inside Room 186 of the Wagon Wheel Inn, Elise will be kneeling on the carpet, which is orange like a tangerine. Her hair is greasy and braided, and a name---tattooed in calligraphy on her neck---is visible. She keeps both hands on the shotgun---the muzzle pressed into Jamey's breast. 

He'll be sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, hands on thighs. 

"Don't you love me?" he'll ask, quiet and desperate. 

"Elise. Come on. Don't you love me?" 

We begin here at this intense scene, in June of 1987. How we get here is to go back to the year before, where a crass vagabond girl from a troubled lower-class home meets a yuppie pretty boy, and they both fall headfirst into a seedy spiral of lust, obsession, and love.

Of course this familiar set-up is a tale as old as time. Shakespeare has got to be pissed from the grave realizing that nobody has come up with a better story line for doomed lovers --- or he's smiling smug, realizing how much influence he continues to have after all these centuries. Either way, Jardine Libaire's White Fur is touted as a "modernized Romeo and Juliet", and it doesn't take much to figure out the destination of the star-crossed in these pages.

Vagabond Heart

 "A female I was, and a female I find myself again; to suffer from it and to rejoice in it."

Renée Néré is my kind of heroine. She's damaged, but still tenacious in the fight; smart, but human enough to second guess such intellect when her heart wants to run free.

She's a 30-something Parisian vaudeville performer whose reveling in a crucible of change and newfound freedom after divorcing a controlling philanderer. Emotionally beaten and bruised by the marriage, Renée is suspicious of romance and isn't keen on surrendering the singular life she has so meticulously assembled for herself. When a handsome and wealthy admirer named Maxime makes his intentions known, Renée is thrust into a tailspin of doubt and temptation, where she wonders if she should allow herself to love again, or remain in a hardened shell of independence.

Colette is my kind of writer. A writer who isn't afraid to prick at human emotion and write about the battle scars. A writer whose works feel so human, so 'lived in'.

Usually I'm not much of a fan of stream-of-consciousness narratives, but Colette's approach at the technique in The Vagabond is exquisite and engaging. Never does Renée's voice wander or sound contrive, and even when it feels frantic it still romantically swings as we experience every doubt, every act of resistance, every passionate surrendering, and every anguished decision. At times while reading a section of prose, I would find myself nodding in agreement, thinking --- is this me? --- even though last I checked I occupy a different skin, a different world than Renée. It's this intimacy towards a character that Colette has achieved best of all in the pages of The Vagabond.

There are claims that this is the most auto-biographical of Colette's works, and that's quite the truth as Renée is in a lot of aspects a vivid rendering of Colette. Like her, Colette was a young woman whose much-older first husband, author and publisher, Henry Gauthier-Villars, was a notorious libertine and an imposing figure in her life. Gauthier-Villars was the one who steered her into a writing career, this at the cost of her own voice, as her classic Claudine series was first published and promoted under her husband's nom-de-plume "Willy".

Most writers often write from experience, and then lie about it later (ha!), but after learning this bit of information I got the sense that Colette, in a way, regained her suppressed voice within the pages of The Vagabond, being one of the first books she wrote that was correctly attributed to her. It's why Renée is written to have such determination for autonomy, and why it's so potent whenever she declares it for herself:

 "You want me to behave like everyone? To make up my mind? Him or somebody else, what does it matter? You want to disturb the peace that I’ve won back, you want to direct my life toward some other concern than the rugged, bracing and natural one of earning my own living? Or are you prescribing a lover for my health, like a purge? What for? I’m feeling well, and thank God, I’m not in love, I’m not in love, I’ll never love anyone, anyone, anyone!"