Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, Part 2
DP: (skeptically) I’m discovering that I actually kinda like the Bromfield… in a weird way. How far along are you?
DV: Sabine just finished thinking that she was going to fix everyone’s life, and Olivia’s having a conversation with her daughter about…
DP: … people she might marry?
DV: Yeah. Trying to figure out how she’s going to get them out of this hell hole to where there’s actually an attractive man.
DP: (laughs) This book is actually a lot like Spinal Tap’s song “Hell Hole.” As in “You know where you stand in a hell hole. Folks lend a hand in a hell hole.” Like, their place is kind of a hell hole, but they love it, and it has its charms. They want to get out of the hell hole and meet attractive men, but in the governing system of the society, it’s a rather nice hell hole. It’s an upper-middle-class hell hole. Even an upper-UPPER-class hell hole!
DV: I’d say. I keep wondering where this actually takes place. I mean, they keep saying they’re in New Hampshire, but I know of no place in New Hampshire that has mills filled with Polish people.
DP: There’s a later reference to something about Vermont.
DV: Yeah, but he goes into Boston every day.
DP: Maybe they’re in southern Vermont? Because southern Vermont isn’t far from Boston…
DV: (waving hands) No, no! Southern Vermont’s left… on my imaginary mental map of the United States.
DP: Maybe, to you, everything’s to the left of Boston, except ideologically.
DV: Indeed. (persisting) No, but New Hampshire is above the northern part of Massachusetts. New Hampshire’s on the coast and then Vermont is above the Berkshires, so you could probably get from the corner of Vermont to Boston… oh man, that would take a couple hours.
DP: Drive. In cars. So I guess it must be in New Hampshire then.
DV: Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to be, but he jets off to Boston to go to work in the morning, which is dumb, so it must be in Massachusetts somewhere. But they keep mentioning New Hampshire. It’s very strange.
DP: I didn’t think about the geography of the book at all.
DV: It’s a minor quibble—I kinda knew what he was getting at—but it bugged me. There are a couple of sloppy things like that. He was specifically talking about the characters’ ages… he has Sabine thinking that she left when she was twenty, and that was twenty years ago, but then she’s more than ten years older than a guy who’s thirty-six. So, wait, was this supposed to be thirty years ago?
DP: She can’t be more than ten years older than O’Hara, because I thought she was a contemporary of Olivia, and Olivia’s only…
DV: Thirty-nine. But in that passage, he says that she [Sabine] is more than ten years older than him.
DP: Unless Sabine is supposed to be a contemporary of Anson, and Anson is greatly older than Olivia, which I didn’t think was the case.
DV: Actually, that makes more sense because it talks about them [Anson and Sabine] both being kids at the same time. Yeah. But, still, it’s weird.
DP: The math doesn’t quite add up.
DV: It’s sloppy… The book turned out to be very stiff and lockjaw-ish, and I keep getting the feeling that he does not quite know whereof he speaks. It doesn’t feel like…. like, Henry James actually grew up in a higher class and stature…
DP: Whereas Bromfield’s just talking out of his ass.
DV: Yes. I just get this talking-out-of-his-ass feeling.
DP: Like when he describes the room. The drawing-room, where there’s the desk where dear old Mr. Lowell sat… with a very vague sense of what that would actually look like and what this sort of life would actually be like.
DV: I can’t tell if that’s authentic or not, because we’re too far removed from it. There are other bits where it seems like he’s just throwing in the props that would be typical of such a thing. It feels very stage-y.
DP: Well, I really really really would like to read a book where there’s some showing and not telling because I think a lot of these books have this in common: it’s just all internal monologue and third-person omniscient narrators. So long swaths of the book are just descriptions of what the characters are thinking. It doesn’t help the staginess of it. It’s all stage directions and no action. Although, I do have to say, I’m farther along than you are, and it’s starting to get spicy. In a completely predictable way. There’s general hook-up-er and Pentland scandals are revealed. (DV speculates as to the nature of the scandals.)
DP: Oh, don’t worry, the scandals aren’t close to the main characters in any way. They’re more historical, genealogical. There’re some spicy love letters in your future. Things start to get a little funky. And in fact, there’s one plot development—is it worth it for me to tell you this or do you just want to find out on your own?—where you find out why John Pentland’s wife went mad. Because she lost her virginity.
(DV cracks up)
DP: No, honestly. She was apparently a “tender, simple woman” who was wooed “too ardently” and then went batshit crazy after she lost her virginity. Well, became a little off after she lost her virginity and went batshit crazy after she had Anson and had to be retired to the attic. Sex is like a squall in this book: it just fucks shit up. It makes the book so much weirder.
DV: Well, remember how we were talking before, that we really just wanted one of the books to not be a bildungsroman? And finally, for the first time, that’s happened. The thing it’s closest to is The Age of Innocence (which I think is a much better book) but it’s about people bursting to get out of society.
DP: And the same sort of obsession with sex and the sexual tension and the fear of class and the money. Yes.
DV: The show-y/tell-y bit struck me most in the dialogue. There’s this big long passage where Sabine and Aunt Cassie are having their showdown…
DP: Evil aunts are also a theme in these books. I keep thinking of the aunt in The Magnificent Ambersons, who maybe wasn’t evil as much as manipulative.
DV: The lonely spinster woman.
DP: Yeah. Nobody likes their aunts, man.
DV: P.G. Wodehouse did hate his aunt… like “barbed wire next to skin.”
DP: (laughs) I’ve never read Wodehouse.
DV: Oh, he’s very funny. Sidebar on Wodehouse: reading him the second time is sometimes better than reading him the first time because he constructs these incredibly elaborate farce plots, very well, but the pleasure you get is from the language.
DP: The plot is beside the point?
DV: Yeah, the fact that it’s nagging at you to find out what happened next is almost irritating. Because what’s so enjoyable about it is like playing Mousetrap: watching the whole contraption go, rather than not knowing what’s going to happen. Plus the immense pleasure you get out of the references. Like one of his aunts: he always describes her as “wearing barbed wire next to skin.”
DP: That’s an apt comparison. There’s nothing more reprehensible than these aunts.
DV: Yeah, now that you mention it, the fact that she Did It (with capital letters) is pretty interesting, because he pretty much implies that Aunt Cassie got married, decided she was an invalid, waits until her husband dies, and now she’s fine. The clear implication that she’s trying to avoid… well, no naughty-naughty for you.
DP: The book is very preoccupied with sex without ever actually saying the word. There’s the weird ruination in Sabine’s past where she had the husband but I guess the husband played around, which she let him… I don’t quite understand that, but there’s something there. Then she’s got her weird daughter who’s all scientific and into frogs.
DV: I was thinking earlier it’s like D.H. Lawrence filtered through nine layers of schmuck.
DP: Then there’s the thing with the groomsman too. You’re so right! That just gets stranger and stranger and stranger as the book goes on. Higgins is a recurring character. In fact, at one point, Higgins develops this conversational affection with O’Hara, and he is trying to imply to O’Hara that Olivia’s a fine pick of a woman, and he calls her a “thoroughbred.”
DV: Ooh, that’s nice.
DP: And the implication is clear that he means “thoroughbred” in the breeding sense, because if she had been paired with a better mate, she wouldn’t have produced such a sickly son as Jack. And at one point Higgins is described as a centaur. There’s something very D.H. Lawrence about him, with him peeking over the bushes.
DV: So you’re saying there are a lot of “subtle” allusions to horseflesh?
DP: (laughs) It’s a book about horseflesh. Sort of. Kinda. It’s a weird book cloaked in a very normal book.
DV: I like that about it, though. I could be down with that. Oh, to go back to the showing/telling thing in the dialogue, so in the big showdown scene, I’m reading the actual dialogue, the stuff between quotes, and it’s perfectly fine. They’re not lighting the world on fire, but they’re getting across the characters’ viewpoints. Every single line of dialogue then is followed by three lines of what the characters are thinking. A good writer would have just put the dialogue and we would have inferred their relationships to each other, which is more fun for the reader.
DP: It’s just a different definition of good writing. It must have to be.
DV: No. Remember when we were talking about The Age of Innocence and the whole point of it was that you had to infer too much? And at some point Wharton cracks and is like, “There’s no way they’re going to get this. I’m going to have to write something down here.” If Wharton had done this, Sabine would have known that Aunt Cassie was offering her pity to humiliate her, but she only would have said, “I see.”
DP: It’s all just describing the subtext. The subtext is rapidly becoming text.
