Silas Marner

Silas Marner Day 19: Let Us Now Praise Powerful Women*

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Hydrangea and Madonna  lilies doing a good domestic job in the drain corner

Been reading Silas Marner intermittently here on the blog. Read the previous posts by typing Silas Marner into the search box. I’m picking up in Chapter X, where we learn how what was, to everyone else in the village, the subject of interesting, idle gossip (the robbery of Silas’s gold) is, to Silas himself, a possibly life-threatening trauma:

To any one who had observed him before he lost his gold, it might have seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken down–the support was snatched away. Marner’s thoughts could no longer move in their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which meets a plodding ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward path.

There is no getting over this.

I’d noticed before that Silas, locked into his loom, had been likened to a spider. Now he’s suffering like an ant. That ‘blank’ that meets the ant ‘when the earth has broken away on its homeward path’ is memorable: there’s something so pathetic about the inability of the creature to  get over, get round, see beyond the breakage which has  stopped it. I always feel a bit scared when I see that – and  that feeling of fear must be because its only a step away from imagining what I might look like to someone much, much bigger, when I am butting up against my insurmountable problems. The  clash of those two perspectives – the stuck and the  bigger picture – is painful. But here we are  – as a not-Silas, imagining perhaps  ‘you could get over it’, but as Silas, just feeling ‘never get over it’. As Emily Dickinson says, ‘the feet,mechanical, go round.’

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

However, Marner does  gain something from his terrible loss, and that is the  kindness of his village neighbours.  It would be difficult to find a modern equivalent to this – maybe workmates’ kindness? For those of us in work, possibly, there can community at work. Maybe in a  street where people are largely unemployed and are also a relativity static population, so have the chance of knowing each other? But for many of us  – no. This wouldn’t happen. We’re not connected enough. Hence the growing UK epidemic of loneliness.

But for Silas, the feel of the village changes: people stop thinking him a witch and start thinking of him as ‘a poor mushed creatur’: and thus along with gifts of black pudding and pigs pettitoes,

Neighbours … showed a disposition not only to greet Silas and discuss his misfortune at some length when they encountered him in the village, but also to take the trouble of calling at his cottage and getting him to repeat all the details on the very spot; and then they would try to cheer him by saying, “Well, Master Marner, you’re no worse off nor other poor folks, after all; and if you was to be crippled, the parish ‘ud give you a ‘lowance.”

One of the neighbours we meet now is Mrs Dolly Winthrop – one of the greatest women in literature, and on a par for me with Paulina, the  powerful matriarchal force at the centre of The Winter’s Tale. Dolly is a do-er,  full of energy and  kindness:

..in all respects a woman of scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning, which it was a constant problem with her to remove. Yet she had not the vixenish temper which is sometimes supposed to be a necessary condition of such habits: she was a very mild, patient woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life, and pasture her mind upon them.

Dolly is ‘eager for duties’, ( this is like Paulina,  faced with a mad and dangerous King, deciding he must be spoken to and resolving ‘He must be told on’t, and he shall. The office becomes a woman best: I’ll take it upon me.’) In the days when most women had no access to careers, women like Paulina and Dolly, who might be running NHS Trusts or Government Departments now, had to use their considerable energy in private life, in relationship management. George Eliot (like Shakespeare?) adores such women.

Before we go back to Silas  I want to notice the use of the verb ‘pasture’ at the end of the section above. We’ve already noticed natural-process metaphors of the seed/harvest type, but  ‘pasture’ is a strange one, isn’t it? It makes Dolly’s mind like a farm animal (for these are the animals that are put to pasture), and that makes Dolly like a workhorse, cow, beast of burden? Patient, mild, but working. Strong. And her mind, when her nature makes her ‘seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life’, gets to work on those sad and serious things, which is a great place for human mind to be.  It doesn’t feel a quick mind, it feels slow and steady, even ruminant. But strong and present. It will do a good job.

There’s a thought here, which I really don’t have time to write out carefully today, about this kind of ‘work’, a kind of work George Eliot herself was particularly good at: the application of intellect and heart to profound human problems.

Yesterday I spent several hours in a Design Team meeting at Calderstones, with a gender balance of three women and eleven men.  The men were architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, health and safety men, quantity surveyors… they were practical men who know about electrical cables and trenches,  bat droppings in roof spaces, loads on beams and lengths of ducting. I was suddenly aware that they were men operating, as it were,  a piece of machinery (the machine: the design/build meeting) which men have been operating for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  Groups of men like this designed the pyramids and put up stonehenge as well as most of the houses we’ve ever had, and I was aware of a culture of men, and the long history of that culture: men in their  structures and specific and hierarchical roles, they all knew where they were and what their bit of the job was, and they got a lot of stuff built. The women in the room were two of us Reader people, ‘the client’, and  the architectural assistant, and that made me think…

What were the women doing all those thousands of years while the men were holding design-build meetings and digging  trenches and  felling oak trees?  They were having babies and  hoeing turnips, looking after toddlers and making clay pots, running dairies and being prostitutes, nursing the sick, laying out the dead, picking  barley. But the boys are having design-build meetings and thinking about smoke escape routes, and drainage and value-engineering.  As Talking Heads sing,

The girls don’t want to play like that,
They just want to talk to the boys.
They just want to do what is in their hearts,
And the girls want to be with the girls.

And very powerful and naturally intelligent women, like George Eliot (aka Marian Evans) and Dolly Winthrop… what did they do with their brains back in the day  when women could not become structural engineers? Marian Evans  could cook a Harvest Home supper for 60 and bottle preserves with the best of them, and by night she used her brain, teaching herself,  as a  young woman, German, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian and complex mathematics at home from books. She was of a class that could buy books, and her father (a design-build man if ever there was one) recognised the brightness of his daughter, and gave her an account at the local bookshop and got her access to the library of his employer at Arbury Hall. But a Dolly Winthrop, with a such a brain, growing up in the peasant class in a rural village? Well, let us see what George Eliot makes of her.

But first, going back to the book, we turn again  to Silas, and see how he will take to Dolly, with her nature and her mind, coming into his life:

Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill. He opened the door wide to admit Dolly, but without otherwise returning her greeting than by moving the armchair a few inches as a sign that she was to sit down in it.

Interesting that before his loss Silas didn’t have any sense of dependence on the goodwill of fellow-men, but now  with nothing else to turn to, he has ‘a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill’.

Excellent. Silas is partially set up for some sort of help, and Dolly is primed to give it.

*My title today calls on James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Silas Marner Day 18 : Acting on the Better Will

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Lilies golden light 19 June

Been reading Silas Marner intermittently here on the blog. Read the previous posts by typing Silas Marner into the search box.

I’m picking up in Chapter IX, and first notice how carefully I need to read this account of Squire Cass. It would be easy to read what you think is there rather than what George Eliot really wants us to see. The Squire is

a tall, stout man of sixty, with a face in which the knit brow and rather hard glance seemed contradicted by the slack and feeble mouth. His person showed marks of habitual neglect, his dress was slovenly; and yet there was something in the presence of the old Squire distinguishable from that of the ordinary farmers in the parish, who were perhaps every whit as refined as he, but, having slouched their way through life with a consciousness of being in the vicinity of their “betters”, wanted that self-possession and authoritativeness of voice and carriage which belonged to a man who thought of superiors as remote existences with whom he had personally little more to do than with America or the stars. The Squire had been used to parish homage all his life, used to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best; and as he never associated with any gentry higher than himself, his opinion was not disturbed by comparison.

My first glance reading seemed to say – ‘there was something about him’ despite his slovenly dress etc. But when I reread I saw that really there was nothing about him except ‘self-possession and authoritativeness of voice and carriage’. I stopped for a while to think about this. The ordinary farmers were just as ‘good’ as Cass – ‘every whit as refined as he’, which is a joke because he is not  very refined at all, and neither are the other farmers… it’s just that Cass comes with a self-belief grown by  generations of  entitlement –  ‘the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best’. And it’s a hierarchy that stops at himself, too, because Cass never meets anyone above him … so he is always top dog in his own world. That’s what’s coming in the room with him, despite his slovenly clothes and ‘slack and feeble mouth’.

On I read…Squire Cass gets annoyed about the loss of the horse, loss of the money, and berates himself for being ‘too good a  father.’

Godfrey was silent. He was not likely to be very penetrating in his judgments, but he had always had a sense that his father’s indulgence had not been kindness, and had had a vague longing for some discipline that would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better will.

I wonder where the thought ‘he was not likely to be very penetrating in his judgments’ comes from? Not from Godfrey Cass himself,  from George Eliot then, from the narrator of this story. The George Eliot voice is also inside Godfrey, knowing his thoughts, as well as judging him from a more external point of view. So the sentence continues  ‘but he had always had a sense that his father’s indulgence had not been kindness’. Not only that, he had ‘a vague longing for some discipline that would have checked his own errant weakness and helped his better will’. This is really interesting to me because I am interested in learning how people change. The language here, of not knowing, but somehow sensing or feeling or knowing vaguely, points to a  kind of unknown knowledge that might be in a person – a clue to being happier?  Because the morality here – ‘errant weakness/better will’ – is not morality for its own sake. Godfrey Cass is not a happy man. Being good might be good for him.

Godfrey left the room, hardly knowing whether he were more relieved by the sense that the interview was ended without having made any change in his position, or more uneasy that he had entangled himself still further in prevarication and deceit. What had passed about his proposing to Nancy had raised a new alarm, lest by some after-dinner words of his father’s to Mr. Lammeter he should be thrown into the embarrassment of being obliged absolutely to decline her when she seemed to be within his reach. He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences– perhaps even justify his insincerity by manifesting its prudence. And in this point of trusting to some throw of fortune’s dice, Godfrey can hardly be called specially old-fashioned. Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend’s confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.

Interesting that chance is so set up against law – any law? ‘Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in.’ is the difference about sticking true to some belief, not so much what the belief is? But the ultimate law for George Eliot here, is the law of consequences in human action,’the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.’

In the religion of chance there is no such law – one hopes for a lucky break. But in the religion of consequences, you know that if you do x, then y will follow.  The sense of the  consequence following – pursuing  – Godfrey is getting a bit frightening. Is his sense of self-worth strong enough to make him take action?

Thinking of the way Godfrey has been brought up by Squire Cass, partly bullied, partly over-indulged. Thinking of the potential good that there might be in Godfrey and which he himself senses.  After all, many men would not have married the alcoholic woman he (presumably) got pregnant. He married her out of ‘compunction’.  That compunction may be a form of  weakness and an attempt to halt the process whereby ‘the seed brings forth a crop after its kind’. Compunction is an  interesting word –  being sharply pricked  – being hurt by remorse… I wonder what  a person like Godfrey, with some sense of  ‘could do better’ – can do to change? and is that going to be possible?  What would need to be in place? Is the pain of compunction what is needed,  or the discipline he somehow vaguely longs for but cannot self-supply?  How is he going to shore up his ‘better will’?

Often we need outside help, new habits, a voice over the shoulder helping us create those new habits…I’m wondering about Miss Nancy Lammeter, could she be the discipline Godfrey needs? … But then, Godfrey is already  married!

 

Silas Marner day 17: Fathers and Sons

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‘All experience is an arch wherethrough…’ Front garden, evening, June 12

I’m late this morning – I’m writing on the train to Bristol, where I’m going to visit The Reader’s South West colleagues. This little Midland train is a commuter train, full of people heading into work at Birmingham. We’re in George Eliot country.

Been reading Silas Marner intermittently here on the blog. Read the previous posts by typing Silas Marner into the search box.

I’m picking up in Chapter VIII, where Godfrey Cass has been skirting around the idea of telling his father all his troubles, his will holding fast to the idea of a confession…more or less. But Godfrey is scared of his father, and I’m interested in the sentences George Eliot gives us to sketch in their relationship – perhaps a clue as to the way our Godfrey grew up (and to brother Dunstan, too). No free-standing adult wants to blame their parents for who or what they are, and yet, every child owes much to its parenting.

The old Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided– as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock.

I want to look up t he word ‘implacable’  here. I know it means something like ‘ not to be moved.’ (looked it up here – much more to do with lack of peaceableness). You can’t easily make peace with him. That strength which he has – his violent anger, his rock-hard resolution – is not at all the strength of peace or secure self. Is this a model for boys to grow up with?

Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard. This was his system with his tenants: he allowed them to get into arrears, neglect their fences, reduce their stock, sell their straw, and otherwise go the wrong way,–and then, when he became short of money in consequence of this indulgence, he took the hardest measures and would listen to no appeal.

George Eliot is describing a class of humans, like a biologist identifying traits in a type of fish: these are the recognisable, classifiable, behaviours of a certain type of man. ‘He allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness,’ shows us a relationship between perhaps deliberate – certainly agreeable, chosen – lack of care and attention, which seems rather mild and perhaps no more than morally lazy, but results in ‘evils.’ I can’t help but see this applying to his sons, Godfrey and Dunstan, who have grown – perhaps not  evil, but in Godfrey’s case  not good, and in Dunstan’s case bad – under their father’s care: was he heedless? Godfrey certainly knows his father’s character, though that does not make him sympathetic to his father’s flaws;

Godfrey knew all this, and felt it with the greater force because he had constantly suffered annoyance from witnessing his father’s sudden fits of unrelentingness, for which his own habitual irresolution deprived him of all sympathy. (He was not critical of the faulty indulgence which preceded these fits; that seemed to him natural enough.)

The father’s ‘unrelentingness’ is contrasted with Godfrey’s ‘irresolution’. These are opposites which seems to drive each other further apart. You might think they might mutually correcting – that someone who was irresolute might learn from who had something like the opposite – but isn’t ‘unrelenting’ going too far in the other direction to help? On the other hand, ‘he was not critical of the faulty indulgence which preceded these fits; that seemed to him natural enough’ – Godfrey only sees part of his father’s behaviour, and it suits him to do so, because the ‘faulty indulgence’  must sometimes throw some good in Godfrey’s own direction – and as he is irresolute so me must be temporarily glad of that indulgence, despite knowing that the angry unrelentingness will come.

Thinking about the kind of discussion that might happen at this point, I’d want to ask  questions about how we make these choices to put up with (a) because we sometimes get (b). What wanting (b) very badly might do to our ability to judge the morality of  (a). Good to think of some examples of this from our own real lives.

But then, press on with Godfrey.

Still there was just the chance, Godfrey thought, that his father’s pride might see this marriage in a light that would induce him to hush it up, rather than turn his son out and make the family the talk of the country for ten miles round.

Godfrey has to reckon up his father’s likely behaviour – will his anger come, or will he be more worried about family shame? So his thoughts go round;

This was the view of the case that Godfrey managed to keep before him pretty closely till midnight, and he went to sleep thinking that he had done with inward debating. But when he awoke in the still morning darkness he found it impossible to reawaken his evening thoughts; it was as if they had been tired out and were not to be roused to further work.

I laughed i recognition at this. You spend all evening going over it. you manage to get to sleep thinking it is settled, then you wake to a kind of deadness – that’s not it, you’re thinking and last night’s resolutions seem to have disappeared. I liked the sleeping metaphor – Godfrey can’t reawaken his thoughts – ‘as if they had been tired out’.  I wonder if this edging towards the making of language about personal morality and choice. I ask myself   -is that what it feels like when my will goes absent? not dead – just sleeping, but not to be roused? a kind of exhaustion, or a kind of laziness?

Instead of arguments for confession, he could now feel the presence of nothing but its evil consequences: the old dread of disgrace came back–the old shrinking from the thought of raising a hopeless barrier between himself and Nancy– the old disposition to rely on chances which might be favourable to him, and save him from betrayal. Why, after all, should he cut off the hope of them by his own act? He had seen the matter in a wrong light yesterday.

Resolution – thought, rationality, determination – choice – ? – is asleep ,  and what Godfrey is aware of is a kind of gut feeling: ‘he could now feel the presence of nothing but its evil consequences: the old dread of disgrace came back.’ This is a feeling of fear.  The grown up child of the father with the implacable anger is afraid. The implacability seems written into the nature of the universe. Mostly, it comes between Godfrey and the possibility of love – Nancy. As the universe is implacable, you can only rely on luck, whim, chance: there’s no arguing your case, no sense that you could affect the course of things. thus ‘ the old disposition to rely on chances which might be favourable to him, and save him.’

He had been in a rage with Dunstan, and had thought of nothing but a thorough break-up of their mutual understanding; but what it would be really wisest for him to do, was to try and soften his father’s anger against Dunsey, and keep things as nearly as possible in their old condition. If Dunsey did not come back for a few days (and Godfrey did not know but that the rascal had enough money in his pocket to enable him to keep away still longer), everything might blow over.

Let’s work round the  old man, the child thinks.  Poor Godfrey. It doesn’t bode well.

Silas Marner Day 16: Forensic Detail

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Artemisia bearing the storms,  11 June

Been reading Silas Marner intermittently here. Read the previous posts by typing Silas Marner into the search box.

I’m picking up in Chapter VIII, where the village of Raveloe, both inside and outside The Rainbow,  is coming to terms with Silas Marner’s robbery.  If we were reading in a Shared Reading group, I’m sure, while I’d be pushing on, pushing on…we’d want to have a laugh about the ear-rings and the tendency to blame a stranger, especially if he looked as though he had ‘a swarthy foreignness of complexion which boded little honesty’.

But we read on to meet with Godfrey Cass, out  chasing his brother Dunstan, and the money he might have made from the sale of wildfire. In this conversation between Cass and fellow horse-enthusiast, Bryce, who  tells Godfrey about the death of the horse during the hunt, I was struck by the little insertion of  a hugely important feeling:

“And so you _did_ give him leave to sell the horse, eh?” said Bryce.
“Yes; I wanted to part with the horse – he was always a little too hard in the mouth for me,” said Godfrey; his pride making him wince under the idea that Bryce guessed the sale to be a matter of necessity. “I was going to see after him–I thought some mischief had happened. I’ll go back now,” he added, turning the horse’s head, and wishing he could get rid of Bryce; for he felt that the long-dreaded crisis in his life was close upon him. “You’re coming on to Raveloe, aren’t you?”

Chatting, holding your end up, keeping a game-face on and all the time feeling ‘that the long-dreaded crisis in his life was close upon him.’ George Eliot carries on with the chat until Bryce turns off on his own road.  That’s a place to stop and consider why a human would squash that terrible feeling into such a small space. And what can happen next?  He’s got to face it.

Godfrey rode along slowly, representing to himself the scene of confession to his father from which he felt that there was now no longer any escape. The revelation about the money must be made the very next morning; and if he withheld the rest, Dunstan would be sure to come back shortly, and, finding that he must bear the brunt of his father’s anger, would tell the whole story out of spite, even though he had nothing to gain by it. There was one step, perhaps, by which he might still win Dunstan’s silence and put off the evil day: he might tell his father that he had himself spent the money paid to him by Fowler; and as he had never been guilty of such an offence before, the affair would blow over after a little storming. But Godfrey could not bend himself to this. He felt that in letting Dunstan have the money, he had already been guilty of a breach of trust hardly less culpable than that of spending the money directly for his own behoof; and yet there was a distinction between the two acts which made him feel that the one was so much more blackening than the other as to be intolerable to him.

“I don’t pretend to be a good fellow,” he said to himself; “but I’m not a scoundrel–at least, I’ll stop short somewhere. I’ll bear the consequences of what I _have_ done sooner than make believe I’ve done what I never would have done. I’d never have spent the money for my own pleasure–I was tortured into it.”

We have got to remember that Godfrey  has been blackmailed by his brother. Yes, as he does, here. Not good but not a scoundrel, he tells himself, and with some self-pity, ‘I was tortured into it.’

Blackmail is a particularly difficult moral knot, isn’t it? In my shared Reading group I’d want to stop here for some time, thinking hard about this bit.

Maybe spelling it out:

  1. Godfrey is secretly married to an addict – an act of ‘compunction’, which he bitterly regrets  -what was behind that, I wonder? If you are ‘not a scoundrel’ but end oup having to marry someone you don’t love… what you been up to?
  2. Dunstan has been blackmailing him about this
  3. Godfrey took rent from one of his father’s tennants and gave it to Dunstan – not good, but not a scoundrel ? – Is this man misjudging himself? is he more  of a scoundrel than he thinks?
  4. Father  now going after the tennant because no rent has come through
  5. Godfrey agrees to sell horse to raise cash
  6. Dunstan kills horse in accident
  7. Dunstan steals Silas Marner’s money and disappears – no one knows he did it
  8. Godfrey has no horse, no money and no idea where his brother is…and still mainly concerned to get off with as little trouble as possible… because he’s not a scoundrel…

What would you do?

Godfrey decides to confess everything. This is what matters most in today’s reading, and I’d  be steering my group to this point – we’ve got to get to this point, today!

Through the remainder of this day Godfrey, with only occasional fluctuations, kept his will bent in the direction of a complete avowal to his father, and he withheld the story of Wildfire’s loss till the next morning, that it might serve him as an introduction to heavier matter. The old Squire was accustomed to his son’s frequent absence from home, and thought neither Dunstan’s nor Wildfire’s non-appearance a matter calling for remark. Godfrey said to himself again and again, that if he let slip this one opportunity of confession, he might never have another; the revelation might be made even in a more odious way than by Dunstan’s malignity: _she_ might come as she had threatened to do. And then he tried to make the scene easier to himself by rehearsal: he made up his mind how he would pass from the admission of his weakness in letting Dunstan have the money to the fact that Dunstan had a hold on him which he had been unable to shake off, and how he would work up his father to expect something very bad before he told him the fact.

I’d want to spread this out, to look in forensic detail at Godfrey Cass’s thinking. So I’d take it one sentence at a time:

Through the remainder of this day Godfrey, with only occasional fluctuations, kept his will bent in the direction of a complete avowal to his father, and he withheld the story of Wildfire’s loss till the next morning, that it might serve him as an introduction to heavier matter.

First, I’d want to imagine those ‘occasional fluctuations’ of the will. What a long day it must have been for Godfrey, waiting to confess.  What is will, I’d want to ask my group members to consider? How do you exert it, or does it control you? Who can resist the prompting for a biscuit/fag/drink/desire to do what you want? Is it will that helps us do this? And how much is will actually habit?

Thinking also of the self-control that is needed not to mention the loss of Wildfire. Godfrey is managing the situation and to a large extent his own feelings in order to produce the outcome he wants – as little trouble from his  father as possible.

Next, I’d want to look at this:

Godfrey said to himself again and again, that if he let slip this one opportunity of confession, he might never have another; the revelation might be made even in a more odious way than by Dunstan’s malignity: she might come as she had threatened to do.

This repetition  – again and again – is clearly connected to the bending of Godfrey’s  will. And the thing of which he is most frightened – that ‘she might come as she had threatened to do.’, is the thing he uses to hold his will to the point. He is scared.

And then he tried to make the scene easier to himself by rehearsal: he made up his mind how he would pass from the admission of his weakness in letting Dunstan have the money to the fact that Dunstan had a hold on him which he had been unable to shake off, and how he would work up his father to expect something very bad before he told him the fact.

Rehearsing is a very  good idea. But the planning of how to  manage his father – ‘he would work up his father to expect something very bad before he told him the fact’ – is manipulative. He’s thinking ahead in order to try to control his father’s emotional response. We have to ask ourselves what kind of man is Squire Cass that he has brought these sons into being? And behind that  there is a question about the validity of class as way of deciding what people are. George Eliot doesn’t believe that class means much. That there is a social hierarchy is a fact, there are higher and lower folks in the village, but  what people really are doesn’t seem closely connected to that hierarchy. But those are thoughts for another day.

Silas Marner Day 15: A Long Night in the Pub & and the end of Middlemarch

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Albertine 5 June
One of the most off-putting things about some Victorian  novels is the use of dialect. It’s so hard to wade through, I try to skip most of it. The worst offender has got to be Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights, but anything of George Eliot’s or Thomas Hardy’s that takes place in a pub, or involves country folk talking to each other for any length of time, comes a close second. My advice is get through it as fast as you can. Just rush.

It can be hard for group members in a Shared Reading group to master the reading of dialect – if there’s someone who can do it well, let them have the reins. If not, read it all yourself, fast,  and get on to the next bit.

I’m in Silas Marner Chapter 6 this morning, and Silas has run down to the pub to tell everyone his money has been stolen. It’s a long night in The Rainbow, despite the good ale. I read fast, almost skipping, though the talk in the bar (though got interested in the story of the parson who was drunk and so got the words of the marriage service wrong: are they still married?

…when he come to put the questions, he put ’em by the rule o’ contrairy, like, and he says, “Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded wife?” says he, and then he says, “Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded husband?” says he. But the partic’larest thing of all is, as nobody took any notice on it but me, and they answered straight off “yes”

This troubles Mr Macey, who is led to a serious question any group might want to stop and consider:

I says to myself, “Is’t the meanin’ or the words as makes folks fast i’ wedlock?” For the parson meant right, and the bride and bridegroom meant right. But then, when I come to think on it, meanin’ goes but a little way i’ most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you? And so I says to mysen, “It isn’t the meanin’, it’s the glue.”

But on we go, speeding through paragraphs about gossip, ghosts,  horses, land and villagers and I’m not very interested, so I wouldn’t stop here, I’d just  rev up, get into fifth gear and motor through as fast as I could. Only when Silas bursts in through the door, at the beginning of Chapter Seven, do I start to get involved again. He’s brought into the room, soaking wet, half out of his mind, sat by the fire, and listened to. And here George Eliot does what she is very good at doing: she notices the  possible, tiny, beginning of  human change:

This strangely novel situation of opening his trouble to his Raveloe neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest promise of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite of his passionate preoccupation with his loss. Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

‘Had doubtless its influence’ she writes, as if  she wishes to mark the every day necessity for doubt – how could such a small thing make any difference in life? That word, ‘doubtless’, is a marker of our normal norms, where unkindness is allowed, and where small kindnesses aren’t always recognised for the powers they might be.

Of course nothing may come of this moment of neighbourliness; much depends on what happens next. But the noticing of such a moment’s possibility  gives me pause for thought. We don’t know what might grow from any act of kindness (or unkindness). But as George Eliot famously writes at the end of Middlemarch, ‘the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.’  We need to make those unhistoric acts as good as we can, as if they were world-changers. We need to do that despite the fact that we can’t see anything happening in the moment: ‘ there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.’

I’m thinking now of a line I read yesterday at our meeting of The Reader’s criminal justice team. These colleagues work in prisons and probation hostels across the country and don’t get to meet as a team very often. It was a pleasure for me to spend a day with them, listening to their shared experience of making Shared Reading happen in some of the country’s most difficult places.  I read a little from Jeanette Winterson’s  memoir, still in my mind from last Saturday’s Spark Series course.

Jeanette writes of the moment she accidentally read a few lines from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in The Cathedral, at sixteen she has realised she is gay and is about tot be thrown out  of the house by her abusive adoptive mother. Where will she live, how will she eat, do her A levels? then she reads :  ‘this is one moment /but know that another/ shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.’

The reading of those lines is a seminal moment for Winterson, and I had thought it might resonate with my colleagues and possibly for the people they read with in criminal justice settings, as it also had done with me.

This may well be one such moment for Silas. And perhaps there are others with a sudden painful joy ahead.

Silas accuses Jem Rodney of taking his guineas – on the grounds that he has been often to Silas’ cottage. But Jem’s been in the pub all night, as everyone present can attest.

“Aye, aye,” said Mr. Macey; “let’s have no accusing o’ the innicent. That isn’t the law. There must be folks to swear again’ a man before he can be ta’en up. Let’s have no accusing o’ the innicent, Master Marner.”

Memory was not so utterly torpid in Silas that it could not be awakened by these words. With a movement of compunction as new and strange to him as everything else within the last hour, he started from his chair and went close up to Jem, looking at him as if he wanted to assure himself of the expression in his face.

“I was wrong,” he said–“yes, yes–I ought to have thought. There’s nothing to witness against you, Jem. Only you’d been into my house oftener than anybody else, and so you came into my head. I don’t accuse you–I won’t accuse anybody–only,” he added, lifting up his hands to his head, and turning away with bewildered misery, “I try–I try to think where my guineas can be.”

I found this very moving when I read this morning – the freshness and live-ness of Silas, willing to be wrought upon by the live situation. He has been like a mechanical creature, almost a mere part of the loom, for fifteen years.  Now suddenly he is coming to life.

Silas Marner Day 14: False hope, real shock

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Albertine Rose Buds and the Sky at 6.00am, 4 June

I had a marvellous day of reading yesterday at  the Ashoka Headquarters on Old Ford Road,  Bethnall Green, London. twelve of us spent the day reading parts of Jeanette Winterson’s powerful memoir and meditation on inner life, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and some poems by a favourite poet of hers, and mine, George Herbert.  It was  really pleasing at the end of the day to hear several group members talking about going off right now to find a bookshop where they could buy Winterson’s book. I think everyone enjoyed an intense reading experience and the personal reflection and reality thrown up by the Herbert poems and Jeanette’s memoir. I really began to think: we need a weekend of this, not just a day.

Thanks to all participants – I really enjoyed reading in your company! Thanks also to Ashoka, for hosting and to Camilla for staying with us and participating in such a lively and engaged way. Thanks to colleagues at The Reader who made it happen.

I’ll be doing a version of the day (same reading materials, though something different will happen because there will be different people present) here in Liverpool on 15th June.

Reading some Silas Marner today. Use the search box to find the back issues which lead us to this point. We’re in chapter three and learning about Godfrey Cass, who at twenty-six and with a bad life mistake controlling his future, is growing bitter.

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature; and the good-humoured, affectionate-hearted Godfrey Cass was fast becoming a bitter man, visited by cruel wishes, that seemed to enter, and depart, and enter again, like demons who had found in him a ready-garnished home.

What’s the story? He got involved with woman who is an addict, and ‘a movement  of compunction’ prompted him to marry her (we presume she has had a child). Now he can’t marry the only person who could him  become a better man (Nancy Lammeter).  The mix of kindness, good humour, affectionate-heartedness and the thing that is not mentioned here – is  weakness or stupidity or bad luck? –  has created the second half of the sentence – bitter, cruel and demons.  this is a man who can’t now stand face to face with himself, so must be distracted and amused:

What was he to do this evening to pass the time? He might as well go to the Rainbow, and hear the talk about the cock-fighting: everybody was there, and what else was there to be done? Though, for his own part, he did not care a button for cock-fighting.

Chapter four opens with a  bit of horse dealing, and goes on to the death of Wildfire. I’m reading on, getting through the story, aiming for whatever the ‘what matters’ is, wherever it is looming up. Here’s Dunstan having sold, then lost the horse, walking home, a little inebriated by his flask of brandy, finding himself out side Silas Marner’s cottage, knowing the rumours of money in there. In he goes, no Silas… and Dunstan  takes the two bags of gold. I’m reading fast, reading through plot. It’s the story, and I’m following it but it is not asking me to think – it’s just pulling me along.

If we were reading aloud in a group now, I’d be going as fast as possible, checking everyone was with me but just  getting  on with  it. No need to stop and talk. I’m at the end of the chapter, and turn the page into the next. But now we are in stop, talk  and think territory right away. why has Silas felt o.k. about leaving his cottage unlocked while he was out on an errand?:

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. This influence of habit was necessarily strong in a man whose life was so monotonous as Marner’s– who saw no new people and heard of no new events to keep alive in him the idea of the unexpected and the changeful; and it explains simply enough, why his mind could be at ease, though he had left his house and his treasure more defenceless than usual.

I would ask people to think about habits, what happens when nothing happens, why we think the expanse of time where  nothing has happened  affects our thinking about whether something will. But I would be here for hours, I want to get on and reach the conclusion of this movement. And here it comes:

He rose and placed his candle unsuspectingly on the floor near his loom, swept away the sand without noticing any change, and removed the bricks. The sight of the empty hole made his heart leap violently, but the belief that his gold was gone could not come at once–only terror, and the eager effort to put an end to the terror. He passed his trembling hand all about the hole, trying to think it possible that his eyes had deceived him; then he held the candle in the hole and examined it curiously, trembling more and more. At last he shook so violently that he let fall the candle, and lifted his hands to his head, trying to steady himself, that he might think. Had he put his gold somewhere else, by a sudden resolution last night, and then forgotten it? A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded off the moment of despair. He searched in every corner, he turned his bed over, and shook it, and kneaded it; he looked in his brick oven where he laid his sticks. When there was no other place to be searched, he kneeled down again and felt once more all round the hole. There was no untried refuge left for a moment’s shelter from the terrible truth.

I’m interested in this sentence, ‘A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded off the moment of despair.’ The metaphor is such a terrible one – the man is about to drown – the sliding moving river-bed stones are no comfort at all, and I can imagine my feet on them, trying to find a footing, hoping, hoping. But in Silas’ case it is more than hoping , it is ‘by acting as if he believed in false hopes’. There’s a huge self-protecting trick playing out – he knows the hopes are false, but he’ll act as if he doesn’t, in order to gain some time before that shock has to hit him and collapse his world.  That’s a self-protective human reaction to terrible shock. I fear for him as he braves it.

More of chapter five tomorrow.

 

Silas Marner Day 13: an intense stream of complex information

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Delightful dark red Geranium in the old bath 29 May

Continuing my slow reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. You’ll find a whole e-text here and previous posts can be found by typing ‘Silas Marner’ into the search box. We’re in chapter three, and I’m picking up where I left off yesterday, in a paragraph beginning ‘With that, Dunstan slammed the door behind him.’

We’d been talking about the interesting matter of different types of human difficulty: is a wealthy, educated person better off than a poor uneducated person when tragedy of pain strikes? And I suppose behind that, there are other questions: What is human culture for? What really would make us ‘better off’? Why learn to read?

After I had finished daily practice yesterday I looked up a post I wrote a  month or so ago about meeting with Paul Sinton-Hewitt, founder of Parkrun. I googled running and reading and found my post  listed below one featuring actor Will Smith speaking on that same subject. What’s reading for, according to Smith? Solving your problems he tells the kids. I completely agree!

Reading does lots of things but its key function – from Will and my points of view – is the transmission of  complex information. If you are interested in this idea read Joseph Gold’s book, The Story Species.  One day when I have more  time for writing than just this daily practice hour, I will write about this great book here. (Have I already done so? I find a few references to the book but no extended writing…)

One of the reasons that reading George Eliot is like a  marathon, difficult but great to do, is that she is par excellence the novelist transmitting the most intense stream of complex information.

This is not ‘entertainment’, not ‘escapism’. It’s not fun and it’s hard to even use the word ‘pleasure’. But it is – for me – enthralling, absorbing, rewarding.

This is ideas, it is thinking, based on observation of real life. If it came in a different format it would be called ‘science’. But it comes in ‘story’ format, which is not routinely understood to be a way of transmitting complex information.

Literature is really a tool for making more of  life, and that ‘more’ is to do with extending consciousness.  Watch her do it here. She’s talking about  well-to-do men, like Squire Cass and his  sons, men for whom you might not easily immediately feel pity.  Translate to modern day ? These guys live in a  big house somewhere in Hampshire or outside Clitheroe and may have made their money in the money industries. Perhaps have a small yacht somewhere on the south coast, maybe a cottage at Dartmouth or in Norfolk. They were dark pink trousers and  striped shirts and straw hats in summer, attend Chelsea Flower Show and go to Glyndebourne.  You (by which I mean I) don’t find it easy to imagine their sorrows.

Read aloud, slowly, maybe one clause at a time:

The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic figures–men whose only work was to ride round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles, and who passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by monotony–had a certain pathos in them nevertheless. Calamities came to them too, and their early errors carried hard consequences: perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any time that twelvemonth? Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men there were some whom–thanks to their native human-kindness–even riot could never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty history.

I start paying full attention at ‘calamities came to them too, and their early errors carried hard consequences’.  It is too easy to see the red trousers and the striped shirt and not see the human inside them. For everyone ‘early errors’ carry ‘hard consequences’ I don’t tend to remember that when looking st someone who seems successful in worldly terms and has a bit of a braying voice. It’s interesting too to see the ‘calamities’ might be very ordinary – missed the right girl.

perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but the maiden was lost, and the vision passed away

I’m remembering that this happened to Silas, and that it was painful when I experienced it as part of his story: why should it be any less so here? What is lost is not just the maiden, but the kind of life she might have helped the man achieve. and without such a life, somehow made good by love, and woman, by domesticity… what life for a single man with money in his pocket?

and then what was left to them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt, or for carrying a gun over the furrows, but to drink and get merry, or to drink and get angry, so that they might be independent of variety, and say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any time that twelvemonth?

Drink. Routine, Habit. These men are in the same pattern as Silas – except he is not a drinker, and he is not rich – oh, but he is! He is a miser, he hoards his money and  enjoys nightly ‘revelry’ with it, in the same way  Squire Cass might enjoy nights in the pub, plenty of wine. Like Silas, such beings are trapped in a mechanical life, where they ‘say over again with eager emphasis the things they had said already any time that twelvemonth’.

Assuredly, among these flushed and dull-eyed men there were some whom–thanks to their native human-kindness–even riot could never drive into brutality; men who, when their cheeks were fresh, had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters from which no struggle could loose them; and under these sad circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty history.

Like Silas, some of these men could never be brutal, they have ‘native human-kindness’. These were men who when young

had felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse, had been pierced by the reeds they leaned on, or had lightly put their limbs in fetters from which no struggle could loose them;

Not sure what this means. Have to stop and read and reread. I understand that  such men might have ‘felt the keen point of sorrow or remorse’ but I am not certain as the the next two clauses: are they elaborations of that first clause or are they additional  examples of how a life is shaped? when I look at the clause, ‘had been pierced by the reeds they leaned on’, I think of Silas Marner in Lantern Yard. He had leaned on the church community , he had leaned on its elders and his friend and fiance: they all proved to be ‘reeds’ – that’s to say thin stalks incapable of providing support. The reeds broke and pierced him. People he had relied on and built his life around finally hurt and  perhaps mortally injured him.

But what about the next bit?

or had lightly put their limbs in fetters from which no struggle could loose them

I wonder if this is about things like addictions, bad marriages, debt? When we are young we undertake acts willingly which may become habits – ‘fetters from which no struggle could loose them.’

This is a great stopping place for a Shared Reading group, where we could all contribute some worked example from our life. George Eliot is strict in her analysis – these are common human problems. The very nature of them may  mean we don’t want to acknowledge them. But she insists ‘common to us all’.

under these sad circumstances, common to us all, their thoughts could find no resting-place outside the ever-trodden round of their own petty history.

I’m interested in the facts that like Silas, such people are trapped in a kind of loom – we enter it, it is around us, we work at it, weaving the cloth of  our life with these repetitive, mechanical thought habits: Never works out for me, he/she/it is no good, life’s unfair, people don’t like me, I always have bad luck, odds are stacked, I’m no good, they are out to stop me.

I think literature exists to help us get out of the self-created-machine-brain. As one of our group members said  long ago, ‘I read about others but I learn about myself.’

Way over time again, and too long. Lack of discipline. Will attempt to correct tomorrow. Poem tomorrow.

Silas Marner Day 12: in which I enter George Eliot’s mind marathon

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Bowls of Beauty welcoming the weekend 27 May

Continuing my slow reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. You’ll find a whole e-text here and previous posts can be found by typing ‘Silas Marner’ into the search box. We’re in chapter three, and I’m picking up just after the conversation between the Cass brothers about selling Godfrey’s horse, Wildfire, to get the money they need to get out of the mess they are in.

Don’t let it be something stuck in the past! Translate, translate, translate. Imagine two brothers from some rich family now, in some mess, used to have several but only got one car left! Going to have to sell the Range Rover!  The car-dealing brother more likely to get a good price. Both of them really sick at losing the car – how the hell will they get about?

Then come back to the book, and pick up the reading:

With that, Dunstan slammed the door behind him, and left Godfrey to that bitter rumination on his personal circumstances which was now unbroken from day to day save by the excitement of sporting, drinking, card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss Nancy Lammeter.

Godfrey Cass is the better of the two brothers, we heard earlier, and certainly the more liked by almost everyone. But  Godfrey is in a mess which provokes constant ‘bitter rumination’, and doesn’t seem to have whatever he needs to get out of it – he only has the temporary distractions of  ‘sporting, drinking, card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss Nancy Lammeter’.

As I read this, I’m thinking of Silas, and difference between his poverty – which is at once economic, cultural and personal – and the riches of a Cass brother. Silas is massively more permanently psychologically damaged (though we sense ruin may lie ahead for Godfrey…) and has retreated to an insect-like routine that means his humanity is somehow on hold: nothing is required of him. (Though I remember he has that evening ‘revelry’ when he enjoys his stash of gold coins…)  But Godfrey, not (yet) awfully damaged, cushions himself in a very different way (the normal pleasures of young men of his class: sporting, drinking, card-playing and Miss Nancy). And is this actually a cushioning, or is it part of the damage he is doing to himself?

George Eliot seems to be about to pick up this thought or some relation to it in this hard sentence. I am struggling to follow her, but I want to follow her, because I think it will be worthwhile, despite the difficulty. She’s like a marathon I’ve entered!

The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents.

Lots of problems here. I’m not giving up, but I am struggling to follow.  I need to concentrate hard.

First of all, there’s a potential worry about some kind of elitist perception of the world which comes from the word ‘higher’. My two questions are: is there any such thing as ‘higher’ in relation to anything other than physical upwardness? If so,  is that higher really being pointed at here? Should I take that word seriously?

The clue is  in Godfrey. Here he is, rich, educated and pretty useless, with some massive problem (secretly married an alcoholic drug user) which causes him to lie and to distract himself  with gambling and drinking etc. This ‘higher’ is a class matter. Can we really read the  word’ higher’ – higher sensibility, higher culture – here with a straight face? George Eliot, though we may not realise it immediately is being ironic, is being sarky. is getting a little jibe in at us, her cultured readers.

Your Shared Reading group might want to stop and talk about whether there is a ‘higher culture’.

You don’t want to jump the gun. It’s important to get through this thought at the right speed.

First question , is there any such thing as higher , except in relation to  physical upwardness? (Answer: In George Eliot there often is, but when it is not sarky, as here,  it comes through more as a demand on me – be higher! get yourself up! I’ll no doubt return to this thought another day as we read on in the novel.)

To get to an answer we may need to translate that word into something which will make the thought more accessible to us.

Let me go back to food as an analogy, as it seems  easier to think of better and worse, higher and lower food culture… Haute cuisine (the high cookery) is  different to both wholesome peasant food and rubbishy contemporary  junk food. What a person likes is a matter of taste (often of habit, and always of experience: you can’t like a Peach Melba if you’ve never tried one.) Can we all agree on that?  I wrote about this in a post long ago, Cheap Beans.

There is great food – characterised by complexity and quality, time and art – and there is more ordinary food – say, baked potatoes with cheese and a bit of salad. And there is rubbishy food, may I say without offence, frozen chicken nuggets or a cheap burger?

To go back to the second question is ‘higher’ really meant here?

 

 

The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture

Someone like me, a rich first worlder , can afford to worry about all sorts of things (slugs eating my hostas, my creme brulee not turning out as well as I had hoped, whether my sandals look nice) that a me living three hundred years ago or now in a poor part of the globe, could not possibly care about. They are my ‘subtle and varied pains’. Am I with George Eliot here? Yes! Can I take those subtle and varied pains very seriously – no! The look of my sandals doesn’t matter. To a certain extent all modern people are Godfrey Cass. It’s not hunting, drink and cards, for our distractions, but for example  telly, shopping, the internet, hostas, trips abroad, drugs…

 

I ask myself, do I feel more now  than I would feel if I was me living as a servant woman 300 years ago? I don’t think so. As first worlder I just have more time to notice more about myself. I’m a Godfrey Cass. My great great grandmother was a Silas Marner.

What would you rather be? A Silas Marner – at least he’s not a liar, and his nightly  revelry with the gold coins harms no one.

The sufferings of those highly educated Cass types, George Eliot continues

are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents.

This goes back to the thought GE had earlier – in chapter one, I think –  about the poorest people having to live with the very real present fears of  simple tragedy: no food, no housing, pestilence, war. These ‘ruder minds’, less developed, less educated minds, live with ‘the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents’.  You can’t get away from them if you’ve got nowhere to go.

I think of Mrs Gummidge, in David Copperfield.  She can’t get her mind off her own woes. It makes her unbearable to live with, though Mr Peggotty bears it, and has invited her to live with his family, and  feels pity for  her sorrows.  If Mrs Gummidge could take an interest in something outside of herself, gardening, say, that interest might help her get away from the ‘urgent companionship’ of her own ‘griefs and discontents.’

As anyone who has been depressed knows, as anyone who has lived with anyone who is depressed knows, you can’t get Mrs Gummidge interested in gardening, partly because of the revolving dark of depression which means it is hard or impossible to notice or care about lovely things like  flowers.

This makes me think that it is in some weird way a good thing that Silas has the pleasure of his revelry with the gold – at least it keeps a sense of joy alive in him.

To go  back to the text:

The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents.

In other words, GE knows we feel more easily sorry for Silas than we do for Godfrey and she probably shares that impulse.  I wonder if she is going to be able to make us feel more pity for middle class got it easy first worlder Godfrey at some point?

What a hard morning’s reading. Way over time so no proof reading this morning, sorry for mitsakes.

 

Silas Marner Day 11: Brothers, Sex, Drink and Drugs

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Paeonia lactiflora ‘Bowl of Beauty’. It went from bud to fully blown yesterday, May 25

Continuing my slow reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. You’ll find a whole e-text here and previous posts can be found by typing ‘Silas Marner’ into the search box.

We are at the beginning of  chapter three, where the story moves from its concentration on Silas Marner’s story to the wider world of Raveloe and other people, other classes. I guess this is the kind of George Eliot writing that can put people off –  long sentences, which if you skim read can seem a bit historical and dull. Just go with it, and go slowly, readers, she’s setting scene and having a little laugh at the way class works at this time, too.

I’m struck, in these opening paragraphs of the new thread of the story, by this commentary:

our old-fashioned country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of men, which are for ever moving and crossing each other with incalculable results.

Here’s a characteristic George Eliot voice, thinking a typical George Eliot thought. Worth stopping, amidst the hams and  winter feasts and visits, to have a moment with this thought. It’s seen from so high up – like someone looking from outer space.  As if life in Raveloe, and all places  in the long ago past, could be easily seen as if by a scientist looking at a tiny world through a microscope. I’m interested in the strong sense of complexity here, those ‘multitudinous currents’, and the word ‘incalculable’ (which comes back later, at the end of Middlemarch).  If life is so complicated, if everything so affects everything else, and if none of that can be calculated… then… what are the implications for us, who must live and act and make choices? George Eliot doesn’t labour this point here, but I’m interested, as someone who has knows her work, to see this thought which became her main working life subject matter, here, present so explicit in this early novella.

I read on. The next paragraph, beginning ‘For the Squire’s wife had died long ago,’  is dense as Christmas pudding. You can’t take much of it at once, because it is packed with information. So read slowly. Take it one sentence at a time and make sure you’ve got it before you go on to the next. Not every sentence requires you to stop and think or talk, but some do. For example, there’s the quick aside which refers to any domestic set-up:

the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome love and fear in parlour and kitchen

I was not surprised to read ‘wholesome love’  but I was surprised to read the word that follows. So I’d stop my reading here and have a think about this bit. Why ‘fear’? because someone has to take strict hold of household economy, and make sure that while everyone has enough nothing is wasted, that servants aren’t able to become thieves, that chaos doesn’t rule. That coupling of ‘love and fear’ is one of the many cross-current complexities that George Eliot is very good at noticing. Worth a think about what a good mother actually is?

But the paragraph pushes on into plot, into story. To paraphrase: Squire Cass has spent too much time in the pub, has two sons, one of them a bad ‘un, the other possibly going bad, a shame because if he married Nancy Lammeter, she  might just have been the saving of that family. She’d have  introduced the ‘love and fear’ the Cass family need.

The next paragraph zooms in to a particular time and place and we see a close-up of Godfrey: a new scene is opening. What’s worth noticing is the violence. We’ve had the strangeness and sadness of Silas’  mental state, we’ve had the comfortable  plenty of the old fashioned cut-off village, and now we have three men living in a house with no wife and mother, all drinking heavily and a powerful undercurrent of violence. There’s a problem with money, a problem with honesty: Godfrey has lent Dunstan money, but the money want his to lend – it wasn’t paid by one of the tenants and meant for the Squire. Godfrey needs to pay the money back, Dunstan  won’t or can’t give it to him. And there is more:

Godfrey bit his lips and clenched his fist. “Don’t come near me with that look, else I’ll knock you down.”

“Oh no, you won’t,” said Dunsey, turning away on his heel, however. “Because I’m such a good-natured brother, you know. I might get you turned out of house and home, and cut off with a shilling any day. I might tell the Squire how his handsome son was married to that nice young woman, Molly Farren, and was very unhappy because he couldn’t live with his drunken wife, and I should slip into your place as comfortable as could be. But you see, I don’t do it–I’m so easy and good-natured. You’ll take any trouble for me. You’ll get the hundred pounds for me–I know you will.”

What! a secret marriage! Brotherly hatred, drink, lies! Life in Raveloe suddenly looks more  complicated than we had originally thought.

In a Shared Reading group at this point I’d be letting the reading pick up speed. We’ve had a couple of sessions on the opening chapters of the book, we’ve got our ears tuned to the way George Eliot writes her sentences, and the plot is beginning to demand some pace.  What I’m looking for now as I read is a moment of thought and when I find it, I’ll want to stop and try to follow, to think on it, or on any points of confusion.

I read on. Dunstan is blackmailing his brother, but it seems as though that may be coming to an end. I’d stop here to consider the problem of being in a bind where coming clean might be, eventually, the only option.  Has anyone ever seen anything like this in real life? It’s not just Dunstan who is blackmailing Godfrey, it is Molly, his abandoned wife:

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Godfrey, quivering, and pale again, “my patience is pretty near at an end. If you’d a little more sharpness in you, you might know that you may urge a man a bit too far, and make one leap as easy as another. I don’t know but what it is so now: I may as well tell the Squire everything myself– I should get you off my back, if I got nothing else. And, after all, he’ll know some time. She’s been threatening to come herself and tell him. So, don’t flatter yourself that your secrecy’s worth any price you choose to ask. You drain me of money till I have got nothing to pacify her with, and she’ll do as she threatens some day. It’s all one. I’ll tell my father everything myself, and you may go to the devil.”

How long does it take to  ‘fess up? How much pressure need be applied? It’s almost as if we’re invited to watch Godfrey under the microscope – what courses of action, in this mess of complexity are open to him, and what will make him choose one?

The next paragraph is a telling one, so we’ll save that for tomorrow.

Silas Marner Day 10: Dog Days and Revelry

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sun on wall
Golden light reflected from a window onto the back garden wall

Continuing my slow reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. You’ll find a whole e-text here and previous posts can be found by typing ‘Silas Marner’ into the search box.

We are at the end of  chapter two, and reading a paragraph that begins,

This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he came to Raveloe. The livelong day he sat in his loom, his ear filled with its monotony, his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of sameness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with such even repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath. But at night came his revelry: at night he closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew forth his gold.

By day, for fifteen years, Silas’ lives as a machine, ‘his muscles moving with such even repetition that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath’. By night, something else happens: he comes to life.

I stop to think about the passage of fifteen years. In a period of time like that a major portion of a human life passes. I taught English in Continuing Education at the university for fifteen years. It was long enough for my underlying rhythm-watcher to feel: this is it, my life. (I’m thinking of Derek Mahon’s poem ‘Dog Days’. (And yes, that is the whle poem. A great poem for a shared Reading group.) Of course I didn’t know it was a fifteen year period at the time, that only became apparent at the end, when things changed. During what will later turn out to be fifteen year period, it feels as if you are in the thick of ordinary and you don’t imagine anything will happen to disrupt the habit of life.

And all this time,  Silas’ life was two-sided, like a coin. By day, part-machine part-machine operator, by night, ‘revelry’!

What an amazing word to have chosen to describe the flip-side of his being. It is so human, so physical, companionable.  I look it up here. Yes, joy, merriment, lively pleasure, even rebellion. It is as if all Silas’ human being goes into the relationship with the coins. He loves them with every bit of his humanity, as if they were human:

He loved the guineas best, but he would not change the silver–the crowns and half-crowns that were his own earnings, begotten by his labour; he loved them all. He spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in regular piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned by the work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children–thought of the guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years, through all his life, which spread far away before him, the end quite hidden by countless days of weaving.

Like the broken water pot we saw in the previous paragraph, the coins have faces, and seem like persons. Coins he doesn’t yet own are like ‘unborn children’ to him. This is  an immense love. Strange that while George Eliot is  spinning a wonderful fairy tale (for that is what it feels like here, isn’t it?) she’s also telling us something profound about the human need to love and to have, to live, our humanity, even when it seems to have gone.

I am thinking about being in a Shared Reading group with a man in a hostel, a street man, a man who smelled and had matted hair. I cannot remember what we were reading, but the man spoke about losing his sense of himself at a very precise point: he knew when it happened: he or his life-force had made a decision. He said ‘I threw my passport and my ISA away and I thought; he’s gone now.’

I was forced by his moving speech to recognise that I had not thought of this man as the same as me, because of his smell and his matted hair. Did I need to be told this man once had a passport and a savings bond to realise he was as human, as living, as complex, as I was?  I am grateful to say that reading with this man compelled me to realise my fellowship (to use a George Eliot word) with him. As we read on together that day, I thought about how it would be to be him, not seen as human on the streets most of the day. Seen as dirty, seen as matted, seen as smelly, seen as bad teeth. But not seen, by most of us, a fellow-creature.  I imagined him with a beggars notice: Yes! I once had an ISA just like you!

Yesterday at five pm as I walked from the Cunard Building on Liverpool Waterfront to Lime Street Station, a mile perhaps through the city centre, I passed three such men, each living in his own doorway. One lay stretched out on a piece of cardboard deeply engrossed in a book. Another had taken off his shoes and was massaging his left foot, as anyone might. Further on, round the side of Marks and Spencer, three battered-looking women were sitting on the pavement in a patch of sunlight drinking from cans, two of them arguing. Each time, I had to think: these are people like me. And in the back of my mind: what are you going to do about this, Jane? I tell myself someone else is doing something, but that doesnt seem a good answer.

Though The Reader has for many years read in hostels and rehabs, and I think we have done some good work there, I can’t help feeling our efforts would be best directed at the children who are growing up into lives of trouble and difficulty.  The problems that get most people to the streets are psychological, spiritual, inner. If the gold had been tins of lager… if Silas had turned at night to whisky…

But I’ve drifted far  from the text – get me back to it!

No wonder his thoughts were still with his loom and his money when he made his journeys through the fields and the lanes to fetch and carry home his work, so that his steps never wandered to the hedge-banks and the lane-side in search of the once familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the barren sand.

So here’s a life that has shrunk from its ‘old breadth into a little shivering thread.’ There were once other activities, the herbs, the healing, but these are quite lost. Thing about a river though, is that it can shrink and come back to fullness. Funny to contrast that ‘little shivering thread’ of Silas’ current life with ‘revelry’ we’ve seen him enjoy with his coins ? Or is it? Is the night-time ‘revelry’ the flip-side of the  inhuman empty life of day? Are the two connected? If the coins were crack, he’d be thoroughly enjoying himself, reveling. But however much he reveled, his life would still be shrunken.

But to press on: a change is going to come for Silas:

But about the Christmas of that fifteenth year, a second great change came over Marner’s life, and his history became blent in a singular manner with the life of his neighbours.

More tomorrow.