479 / with books and music somewhat Delphic in character

putterings 478 < 479 > 480 index

with books and music; somewhat Delphic in character

“He’s having a joke with you, George,” Mrs. Branch remarked.
“I know,” Cryder said. “I’ve known Aleck a long time.”
“He gives the impression that we’re ostracized. . . . Not at all. We don’t care for an intense social life. That’s all there is to it. We read a lot and stay at home in the evening puttering with books and music.”
“This is a busy town,” Branch remarked. “I mean the men are all workers and busy. . . . Not much for women to do in the way of a career.”
“And women are having careers nowadays,” Cryder said, with masculine unctuousness.
Margaret sat down on a pile of cushions on the floor before the fire, Turkish fashion — tailor fashion. “Women don’t have to seek careers,” she asserted. “Every woman is born into a career.”
[211]
The men looked interrogations.
“The dramatic career of being a woman,” she continued. “It’s like being born to play a part in a play, and playing it all your life.”
“The dramatic career — of — being — a woman,” her husband mused aloud. “You mean all the charms and artifices, the beautifying and so on? Is that what you mean?”
Margaret shook her head. “My meaning is rather more comprehensive than that. . . . Women are like actors before an audience, trying to give the audience what it wants. Seems to be expected of them. . . . They’d like to be true to themselves, but men won’t let them be.”
“I’m downright astonished at your assertion,” said George Cryder. “I’ve always had the idea that men make goddesses of women, and let them do precisely as they please.”
Margaret’s continuation was somewhat Delphic in character...

ex Part II, Chapter IV, “Host Poisons Noted Guests” — surely a scene set in the Woodwards’ own living room ! — in
W. E. Woodward. Lottery (1924) : 210
U California copy/scan (via google books) : link
same (via hathitrust) : link

William E. Woodward (1874-1950), novelist, historian; earlier, journalist, advertising copywriter, banker

“W. E. Woodward, Biographer, Dies;
Developed Candid Technique in Works on Washington and Grant — Coined ‘Debunk’”
The New York Times (September 30, 1950) : link (paywall)

aside —
watch this space for transcription, and more on Woodward as I find it.

—

Woodward is new to me, historians have moved on; his biographies of George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant eclipsed his earlier novels, which “are not likely to be rescued from oblivion” wrote Kenneth M. Stamp in his review of Woodward’s posthumous Years of Madness (1951) — The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 38:4 (March 1952) : 716-717 : link (jstor) — and are now themselves eclipsed.

However. I feel that Woodward’s Lottery looks forward, not back — forward 90 and 100 years to the present collective ethos that makes the Trumpian ilk possible and politically viable.

Reading this book intersects with recent thinking about how the huckster, confidence man (and woman), grifter et al, is an unsurprising tactic of later arrivals, come to find the best land taken (and much of it worked by slaves), the names of the elect carved in the best pews, their homes and positions on cities on the hill, so to speak, already spoken for by righteous Christian forerunners, whose righteousness justified genocide and indentured servitude. Their sons in the pulpit, bishops, professors, lawyers, justices. And so of course, the arrivistes must find their way round these impediments.

Along these lines, this passage from Lottery, followed by two others on Garrison’s mind —

Lulu [J. J. Garrison’s wife, “chum,” partner] did not like the Daughters of the American Revolution, nor the Society of Colonial Dames. These two societies included the social élite of Riverside; and to Lulu, despite her husband’s phenomenal success and her own French gowns, the élite of Riverside was a garden within walls, and she was on the outside.
The social universe in which Mr. and Mrs. Garrison were shining stars was composed of cotton-mill managers and their wives, prosperous real estate promoters, fast-living professional men and their families, and a few heavy-faced King Street merchants.
These people ran about the country in swift automobiles, drank too much, and consumed huge steaks slathered with mushrooms at road houses.
People with fat minds running around in big, fat cars. They were in flight; they were running away from something. They did not know what they were fleeing from; it was something inside of them, and they never looked inside. They thought they were merely making motor trips...
p 397
another, about the mental composition of J. J. Garrison —
Like most boys who are brought up shifting for themselves, Jerry matured early.
In the place of the sterile and inflexible system of knowledge imparted by the schools, he acquired, as he grew to manhood, a collection of surmises, facts, newspaper sensations, street talk, impressions, and preferences. These convictions had fallen on his mind as straws fall on a floor, cross-wise and at acute angles, and facing each other in attitudes of deadly contradiction. He was unaware of these potential antagonisms; and at any rate he would not have cared, for he was so constituted that he did not mind inward contradictions. A happy provision of nature, this; otherwise his ideas would have fought one another in his brain like maddened cats, and he would have perished of intellectual suicide.
p 45
and another view of the keep-it-vague mind of J. J. Garrison —
Garrison felt himself involved in subtle perplexities. What was to be the outcome of the thing, anyway? He detested problems; his mind habitually ran around them like a stream running around an island.
p 194

W. E. Woodward is not much attended to now, there is no wikipedia page for him; his wife Helen Rosen Woodward (1882-1960), advertising copywriter and entreprenur, is every bit as interesting.

see her entry (by Susan Martha Kahn) in The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women
link

See also the profile of “Primrose House” — an up-market beauty salon conceived by Woodward; financed by some Lowell, Massachusetts investors; and located in New York City — at Cosmetics and Skin : link

more to come.

1 October 2024