 Santa Richard with His Partner, Santa Ken ALL MY READERS: I WILL RESUME POSTING ON JAN. 3!
LOOK FOR MY EMAIL AT THAT TIME. THANKS FOR READING IN 2022. —RJ Coming Next: 1/03/23: A Writer's Wit | TBD 1/04/23: A Writer's Wit | TBD 1/05/23: A Writer's Wit | TBD 1/06/23: My Book World | TBD
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My Book World Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. With an introduction by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Scribner, 1997 (1913). Wharton, portrayer of early twentieth-century America, unveils the life of one Undine Spragg who, in time, will marry three men, one of them twice. From the time Undine is a young woman, she is hard to please. She never has quite the clothes she wants, never quite associates with the people she really wishes to. And when someone, like her parents, stretch themselves to make her happy, she is far from grateful. She is like this with each of her husbands, too, the first one an apparent rube from her small New York City suburb. Then, she marries up, a handsome man who might become a poet, but because she doesn’t wish to live on his small trust and make do, he must go to work. Jumping to France, she marries royalty, but even he doesn’t have enough money, and she leaves him, as well. Finally, she marries the rube again (he just happens to be in France), because since the early days he has become a billionaire. And he gives her nearly everything she can dream of, including a fine home to a little son (by husband two) she his ignored since his birth nine years earlier. She attempts to goad this man into becoming an ambassador (on the book’s last page), but when he tells her that she could never become an ambassador’s wife because she is divorced, she is furious. Wharton ends the novel this way: [Undine] had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife: and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for” (509). Wharton’s novel, some say, is prescient for its time, predicting what American society might become like. And along with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)—whose novels are published at roughly the same time (within a decade)—she limns what can happen to ambitious women who have no place in society except to be some man’s wife.
Coming Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kenneth Patchen WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Jackson THURS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Rukeyser FRI: My Book World | Bloom & Atkinson's Evidence of Love
Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World |Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kenneth Patchen WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Jackson THURS: A Writer's Wit | Muriel Rukeyser
Coming Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Banville FRI: My Book World | Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country
Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Noam Chomsky THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Banville FRI: My Book World | Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country
My Book WorldWagner, Sara Moore. Swan Wife. San Diego: Cider Press, 2022.
These may be some of the most exciting poems, the most developed poems I’ve read by a contemporary poet in a long time. Wagner’s structure is deliberate, appropriating certain aspects from Joseph Campbell studies to frame her collection. Sure of her technique and subject matter, Wagner ensures her poems pop with energy: they possess a natural, almost childlike quality in their enthusiasm about youthful love, marriage, having that first child. In “Licentious,” my favorite passage may be: She tells me come out, someone might see me, the bounce of my breasts, this ache. I will have to marry the snake slivering into the banks, will have to marry the sun, a thick hand on my shoulders (xi). Wagner’s title may well spring from “Ball and Chain,” the moment the persona emotionally becomes the betrothed, the soon-to-be swan wife: I dipped my toes in and you called me swan, you said you’ll go where you want. It was maybe then I knew you saw me, how I wanted to fly or float, to cover. How even a mute swan will hiss and attack if you get too close. How you called me beautiful then, so beautiful and so loud, the say I’d hoot up to the stars, the way I showed my teeth (7). The poet’s persona maintains her controlled ebullience throughout the entire collection, and I hope to read more of Wagner’s work. Congratulations to her for winning the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award. The collection is quite deserving. Coming Next: TUES 12/06: A Writer's Wit | Ève Curie WEDS 12/07: A Writer's Wit | Noam Chomsky THURS 12/08: A Writer's Wit | John Banville FRI 12/09: My Book World | Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country
Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World | Sarah Moore Wagner's Swan Wife TUES 12/06: A Writer's Wit | Ève Curie WEDS 12/07: A Writer's Wit | Noam Chomsky THURS: 12/08: A Writer's Wit | John Banville |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
January 2025
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