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phantomtomato) wrote2025-05-12 09:40 pm
phantomtomato) wrote2025-05-12 09:40 pm
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Reading Roundup, April 2025
This post is very late for a monthly roundup, but you’ll forgive me as I’ve just spent two weeks in Japan! It took me a few days after returning home to get my bearings and type these up. Next month: Stephen Spender, Donna Tartt, and perhaps a third book.
Nottingham Lace, E. M. Forster
I read the unfinished manuscript which would have been one of E. M. Forster’s first novels, now included in the Forster Abinger edition volume entitled “Arctic Summer & Other Stories.”
In it, a boy of 18 named Edgar Carruthers lives with his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Manchett. His mother is deceased and his father studies temples in India, leaving the son to relatives’ unfriendly care. Edgar has twin boy-cousins, Jack and Harold.
When “vulgar” new neighbors move in across the street, Mrs. Manchett is scandalized by the prospect of having to socialize with them. One, Sydney Trent, is a new master at her sons’ school. He might be tolerated on that quality, but he antagonizes Mrs. Manchett and thus confirms the central conflict of manners.
In the ~60 pages which exist, Edgar makes an acquaintance of Sydney Trent, fails to notice the flirtations of an eligible young woman, and is perhaps about to share sympathies with his cousin Jack when the draft leaves off. It bears similarities with Howards End (in the dull conventionality of an incurious middle-class family) and The Longest Journey (in the Edgar-Sydney relationship, which is not but almost could have been Rickie and Stewart).
I’ve said in past reviews that I wished Forster wrote more books about male characters. I truly love how he shades the experience of living as a queer man in Edwardian England, something we only get in detail in The Longest Journey and Maurice. It is the Tibbies and Freddies and Philips, the queer comic-relief brothers occupying mostly the margins of his other novels, which invariably fascinate me most. This book promised to be that product: almost a school story (Edgar is no longer in school, but Trent went to Cambridge and maybe would have helped Edgar to get there), featuring many central male personalities (Edgar, Trent, Mr. Manchett, Jack) so as to offer contrasts between them… I am sad to know that Forster abandoned it.
The way by which I came to know it was through Elizabeth Heine’s afterword to the Abinger Edition of The Longest Journey, reprinted by Penguin Classics. She mentioned it for its similarities to TLJ, before deriding the plot as essentially juvenile. Certainly, Nottingham Lace is juvenalia, in that it is not a finished and published novel. But it is also so clearly unfinished that I struggle to understand any critiques of its form as meaningful. Perhaps I am being defensive of the early queer Forster novel that wasn’t.
Part of its unfinishedness that I find so fascinating is how short are all of its scenes. They lack Forster’s usual touch for setting and place-making, but contain all of his usual deftness around dialogue and how it interplays with narration. I wonder if this was characteristic of his process, and that he often sketched out the interactions of a scene before going back to color them in with environmental details.
Overall, I wish this were finished and that we had got the full-length school novel/novel about a boy’s adolescence which Forster was clearly past the time to write by 1907. I will always be deeply moved by the school novel as a form, and more generally by stories which examine that radical change of adolescence, and I think that this one would have been up my alley. I will have to content myself with the Cambridge section of The Longest Journey.
Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, J. E. C. Welldon
This book imagines itself to be a school novel of the late Victorian tradition, with an odd-couple romantic friendship amidst a background of Muscular Christianity. It also imagines itself to be an Austenian romance crossing class lines. It also imagines itself as a tragedy of youth in the vein of Goethe. Don’t you like all of that in the same novel?
Welldon was not blessed with clarity of expression—something noted and critiqued by his peers, as can be seen from his Wikipedia page. A schoolmaster and clergyman, he lived a long and contentious public life. Most relevantly he was the head of Harrow School in the 1880s and 1890s, and like many other heads of the 19th century, he tried his hand at the school novel fad. The result is not very good.
Gerald Eversley is an awkward, lonely middle-class boy, the son of a country clergyman, raised by a neglectful stepmother and an overprotective father. Luck with a scholarship brings him to St. Anselm’s school for boys, where circumstance creates the titular friendship between Gerald and the upper-class Harry Venniker, son of Lord Venniker. Their friendship is the stuff of romantic legends:
And their school days follow the rhythm of Tom Brown: induction into the house through fagging (compared to “slave girls at the market”), sports, a cheating scandal, and a scholarship to Oxford.
Only: this is told to us through the framing device of an unnamed narrator (cribbed from Young Werther, doubtless!) and with all of the dispassionate remove that that implies. The narrator begins to shift from dry retrospection to tragic portents of doom as Gerald grows older (much of his school development being skipped over to move the story along) and so we arrive at the final section, during his university days, with not the barest elaboration of Gerald’s daily life. Studies, though they make up the bulk of his time, are pushed aside in favor of an engagement to Harry’s younger sister. This engagement cures a lapse of faith from lonely, intellectual Gerald. Then she dies, leaving Gerald bereft and condemning him forever to a bachelorhood of isolation and charity.
It is impressive to see just how little Welldon understood that a school novel, even one with a great deal of proselytizing, must be exciting. One of his “Gerald at Oxford” chapters is thousands of words of rumination on faith not even from Gerald but from the nameless narrator, who we must assume stood in for the author himself in that moment. Harry has all the makings of a grand romantic obsession for Gerald, only he was left to languish at the stage of a character sketch. We barely see him, and know even less of their exploits as friends, if indeed they shared any. So little time is spent there! We do see a huge amount of Gerald’s father, who is compared to a lover not once but twice, in service of Gerald’s arc around agnosticism. Really, this book is more an artifact of Welldon having created for himself a pet favorite, and then wanting to run that blorbo through facsimiles of plots from all of his favorite authors. He tells us as much when he references Austen and Goethe and Tom Brown by name in his own text! Buy in mashing all of these influences together, he fails to demonstrate an understanding of the delicate mechanisms which make each one work—and the fundamental incompatibilities between them.
Stoner, John Williams
In Stoner, we follow William Stoner from his late adolescence through his fateful exposure to the academic field of English literature, in college, and subsequent career as a professor. As the son of poor farmers in a still-young (early 1900s) Midwestern USA, he was fated to experience some hardship—but the slow-burning tragedies of his full life are thoroughly the product of his own choices. This is an engagingly well-written story which sometimes allows you to forget its heaviness as you fly through the pages, but death and defeat haunt William Stoner, and the end of the novel will not allow you to forget that.
This book has sat in my e-reader for years, following a friend’s recommendation. I wish that I could recall the specifics of that rec—it must clearly have had something to do with the main character being an academic, but I wonder how much the mood of the novel was or wasn’t present in the rec. Unfortunately, it was an in-person conversation that I cannot recover!
Overall I think the impression that I feel most strongly after finishing is that of Stoner’s passivity. His life has many tragedies—the loss of a dear friend, an unhappy marriage and estrangement from family (wife, parents, daughter), a career derailed by department politics and personal dislike, an affair of true love sacrificed to propriety. Any one of these would be difficult to bear; the effect of piling all of them onto unassuming and inoffensive Stoner is that of absurdity. He deserves none of this, but in accumulating each indignity, I begin to see him as deserving all of it.
To try and explain: Stoner does very little to resist his circumstances. We understand there are reasons behind each decision for inaction (finances, social scandal, career impacts, etc.). But at some point, the reasons fade behind his chronic inability to anticipate some new consequence or retaliatory path of action, especially once his main adversaries (wife and department chair) are in place. I don’t mean to say that Stoner is an ineffective novel, because it is quite distinctly persuasive to me that passively allowing life to happen to oneself is a recipe for tragedy. One wonders what might have happened if Stoner had divorced, or had pursued a different employer after his department became hostile to him. The book is realistic; these would not have been easy choices in Stoner’s universe. But they were options, and Stoner repeatedly and resolutely takes as a given that it is out of his control to make them.
There is one early chapter that I love. It describes Stoner’s initial entry into English literature academia, and how, during his grad school days in the 1910s, he befriends two fellow students. One, Gordon Finch, represents mediocre conventionality: a friend, but one forever bounded by a mild middle-class selfishness. The other, David Masters, is a cynical but bright young man who identifies The Academy, and the three of them as an extension of it, as a group of misfits. The chapter builds their awkward relationship as they work towards their dissertations amidst the news of war in Europe—you can guess where the story is headed, and who survives, as you read. But as another snapshot of the horror of WWI on the youth of that era, it really works.
When the novel calls back to this friendship in later chapters, I am moved by it. In some ways, this dead friend is the defining tragedy of Stoner’s life—setting him on his ultimate course—but in some ways it is crowded out by all that follows, and the necessarily bigger impacts on his happiness that they entail. I don’t think that this could be a novel about a lost youthful friendship haunting a man for the rest of his life, but it would have earned the right to be.
Probably the enduring value of Stoner in most cases comes from its portrayal of academic departmental politics. Exaggerated for fiction only a bit, the book really does describe the long-simmering resentments born of forced proximity between colleagues who resent each other. (My department is not this! But even at my school I can think of one or two which are.) I think it’s interesting to see so many challenges of the modern higher ed landscape in a mid-century novel about early 20th century academia. Some things are universal, I guess.
All said, I think I could most recommend the book on that feature, but with the warning that Stoner’s personal tragedies bring the book to unavoidably heavy lows. It is in some ways a fun read—fast-paced and with insightful, well-balanced prose—but the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and many people would be reasonably turned off by the mood or Stoner’s inaction or certain plot elements (e.g. the affair). It deserves to be called a good book, which I think is my final word on the matter.
Nottingham Lace, E. M. Forster
I read the unfinished manuscript which would have been one of E. M. Forster’s first novels, now included in the Forster Abinger edition volume entitled “Arctic Summer & Other Stories.”
In it, a boy of 18 named Edgar Carruthers lives with his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Manchett. His mother is deceased and his father studies temples in India, leaving the son to relatives’ unfriendly care. Edgar has twin boy-cousins, Jack and Harold.
When “vulgar” new neighbors move in across the street, Mrs. Manchett is scandalized by the prospect of having to socialize with them. One, Sydney Trent, is a new master at her sons’ school. He might be tolerated on that quality, but he antagonizes Mrs. Manchett and thus confirms the central conflict of manners.
In the ~60 pages which exist, Edgar makes an acquaintance of Sydney Trent, fails to notice the flirtations of an eligible young woman, and is perhaps about to share sympathies with his cousin Jack when the draft leaves off. It bears similarities with Howards End (in the dull conventionality of an incurious middle-class family) and The Longest Journey (in the Edgar-Sydney relationship, which is not but almost could have been Rickie and Stewart).
I’ve said in past reviews that I wished Forster wrote more books about male characters. I truly love how he shades the experience of living as a queer man in Edwardian England, something we only get in detail in The Longest Journey and Maurice. It is the Tibbies and Freddies and Philips, the queer comic-relief brothers occupying mostly the margins of his other novels, which invariably fascinate me most. This book promised to be that product: almost a school story (Edgar is no longer in school, but Trent went to Cambridge and maybe would have helped Edgar to get there), featuring many central male personalities (Edgar, Trent, Mr. Manchett, Jack) so as to offer contrasts between them… I am sad to know that Forster abandoned it.
The way by which I came to know it was through Elizabeth Heine’s afterword to the Abinger Edition of The Longest Journey, reprinted by Penguin Classics. She mentioned it for its similarities to TLJ, before deriding the plot as essentially juvenile. Certainly, Nottingham Lace is juvenalia, in that it is not a finished and published novel. But it is also so clearly unfinished that I struggle to understand any critiques of its form as meaningful. Perhaps I am being defensive of the early queer Forster novel that wasn’t.
Part of its unfinishedness that I find so fascinating is how short are all of its scenes. They lack Forster’s usual touch for setting and place-making, but contain all of his usual deftness around dialogue and how it interplays with narration. I wonder if this was characteristic of his process, and that he often sketched out the interactions of a scene before going back to color them in with environmental details.
Overall, I wish this were finished and that we had got the full-length school novel/novel about a boy’s adolescence which Forster was clearly past the time to write by 1907. I will always be deeply moved by the school novel as a form, and more generally by stories which examine that radical change of adolescence, and I think that this one would have been up my alley. I will have to content myself with the Cambridge section of The Longest Journey.
Gerald Eversley’s Friendship, J. E. C. Welldon
This book imagines itself to be a school novel of the late Victorian tradition, with an odd-couple romantic friendship amidst a background of Muscular Christianity. It also imagines itself to be an Austenian romance crossing class lines. It also imagines itself as a tragedy of youth in the vein of Goethe. Don’t you like all of that in the same novel?
Welldon was not blessed with clarity of expression—something noted and critiqued by his peers, as can be seen from his Wikipedia page. A schoolmaster and clergyman, he lived a long and contentious public life. Most relevantly he was the head of Harrow School in the 1880s and 1890s, and like many other heads of the 19th century, he tried his hand at the school novel fad. The result is not very good.
Gerald Eversley is an awkward, lonely middle-class boy, the son of a country clergyman, raised by a neglectful stepmother and an overprotective father. Luck with a scholarship brings him to St. Anselm’s school for boys, where circumstance creates the titular friendship between Gerald and the upper-class Harry Venniker, son of Lord Venniker. Their friendship is the stuff of romantic legends:
“If the exquisite Aristotlian test of love be true, that is not so much the sense of pleasure in the presence of the beloved one as the sense of pain at his [Venniker’s] absence, it was satisfied by Gerald Eversley.”
And their school days follow the rhythm of Tom Brown: induction into the house through fagging (compared to “slave girls at the market”), sports, a cheating scandal, and a scholarship to Oxford.
Only: this is told to us through the framing device of an unnamed narrator (cribbed from Young Werther, doubtless!) and with all of the dispassionate remove that that implies. The narrator begins to shift from dry retrospection to tragic portents of doom as Gerald grows older (much of his school development being skipped over to move the story along) and so we arrive at the final section, during his university days, with not the barest elaboration of Gerald’s daily life. Studies, though they make up the bulk of his time, are pushed aside in favor of an engagement to Harry’s younger sister. This engagement cures a lapse of faith from lonely, intellectual Gerald. Then she dies, leaving Gerald bereft and condemning him forever to a bachelorhood of isolation and charity.
It is impressive to see just how little Welldon understood that a school novel, even one with a great deal of proselytizing, must be exciting. One of his “Gerald at Oxford” chapters is thousands of words of rumination on faith not even from Gerald but from the nameless narrator, who we must assume stood in for the author himself in that moment. Harry has all the makings of a grand romantic obsession for Gerald, only he was left to languish at the stage of a character sketch. We barely see him, and know even less of their exploits as friends, if indeed they shared any. So little time is spent there! We do see a huge amount of Gerald’s father, who is compared to a lover not once but twice, in service of Gerald’s arc around agnosticism. Really, this book is more an artifact of Welldon having created for himself a pet favorite, and then wanting to run that blorbo through facsimiles of plots from all of his favorite authors. He tells us as much when he references Austen and Goethe and Tom Brown by name in his own text! Buy in mashing all of these influences together, he fails to demonstrate an understanding of the delicate mechanisms which make each one work—and the fundamental incompatibilities between them.
Stoner, John Williams
In Stoner, we follow William Stoner from his late adolescence through his fateful exposure to the academic field of English literature, in college, and subsequent career as a professor. As the son of poor farmers in a still-young (early 1900s) Midwestern USA, he was fated to experience some hardship—but the slow-burning tragedies of his full life are thoroughly the product of his own choices. This is an engagingly well-written story which sometimes allows you to forget its heaviness as you fly through the pages, but death and defeat haunt William Stoner, and the end of the novel will not allow you to forget that.
This book has sat in my e-reader for years, following a friend’s recommendation. I wish that I could recall the specifics of that rec—it must clearly have had something to do with the main character being an academic, but I wonder how much the mood of the novel was or wasn’t present in the rec. Unfortunately, it was an in-person conversation that I cannot recover!
Overall I think the impression that I feel most strongly after finishing is that of Stoner’s passivity. His life has many tragedies—the loss of a dear friend, an unhappy marriage and estrangement from family (wife, parents, daughter), a career derailed by department politics and personal dislike, an affair of true love sacrificed to propriety. Any one of these would be difficult to bear; the effect of piling all of them onto unassuming and inoffensive Stoner is that of absurdity. He deserves none of this, but in accumulating each indignity, I begin to see him as deserving all of it.
To try and explain: Stoner does very little to resist his circumstances. We understand there are reasons behind each decision for inaction (finances, social scandal, career impacts, etc.). But at some point, the reasons fade behind his chronic inability to anticipate some new consequence or retaliatory path of action, especially once his main adversaries (wife and department chair) are in place. I don’t mean to say that Stoner is an ineffective novel, because it is quite distinctly persuasive to me that passively allowing life to happen to oneself is a recipe for tragedy. One wonders what might have happened if Stoner had divorced, or had pursued a different employer after his department became hostile to him. The book is realistic; these would not have been easy choices in Stoner’s universe. But they were options, and Stoner repeatedly and resolutely takes as a given that it is out of his control to make them.
There is one early chapter that I love. It describes Stoner’s initial entry into English literature academia, and how, during his grad school days in the 1910s, he befriends two fellow students. One, Gordon Finch, represents mediocre conventionality: a friend, but one forever bounded by a mild middle-class selfishness. The other, David Masters, is a cynical but bright young man who identifies The Academy, and the three of them as an extension of it, as a group of misfits. The chapter builds their awkward relationship as they work towards their dissertations amidst the news of war in Europe—you can guess where the story is headed, and who survives, as you read. But as another snapshot of the horror of WWI on the youth of that era, it really works.
When the novel calls back to this friendship in later chapters, I am moved by it. In some ways, this dead friend is the defining tragedy of Stoner’s life—setting him on his ultimate course—but in some ways it is crowded out by all that follows, and the necessarily bigger impacts on his happiness that they entail. I don’t think that this could be a novel about a lost youthful friendship haunting a man for the rest of his life, but it would have earned the right to be.
Probably the enduring value of Stoner in most cases comes from its portrayal of academic departmental politics. Exaggerated for fiction only a bit, the book really does describe the long-simmering resentments born of forced proximity between colleagues who resent each other. (My department is not this! But even at my school I can think of one or two which are.) I think it’s interesting to see so many challenges of the modern higher ed landscape in a mid-century novel about early 20th century academia. Some things are universal, I guess.
All said, I think I could most recommend the book on that feature, but with the warning that Stoner’s personal tragedies bring the book to unavoidably heavy lows. It is in some ways a fun read—fast-paced and with insightful, well-balanced prose—but the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and many people would be reasonably turned off by the mood or Stoner’s inaction or certain plot elements (e.g. the affair). It deserves to be called a good book, which I think is my final word on the matter.
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You should! I found the Abinger edition on archive.org for digital lending, which made it pretty easy to read.
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