Adrienne Rich (1979)

I was brought to this book through one of the essays in it, Claiming an education, that talks about the need for students (and especially women students) to actively claim their educations rather than passively receive them. I still think this is the most powerful element of this collection, but there’s lots more to engage the reader.

It’s not an easy collection for a man to read, not least because of the sense of powerlessness it evokes – which is ironic, given that many of the essays are replete with the power of patriarchy and men’s dominance of women. But there’s a powerlessness too, a sense that, as a man, there’s no redemption, no way to help or bridge the gap, no way to avoid being an obstacle that women must struggle against despite your own individual actions and intentions.

Some of the essays are nearly fifty years old, but they’re aged well, and the issues they address are still very much alive. In many ways they’ve broadened beyond being purely women’s issues. It’s easy to read in many of them a rage that any powerless group might feel against any establishment. In some ways Rich’s arguments are occasionally almost weakened by their feminism, in that many men in powerless roles would identify with the feelings she examines. But they give a powerful insight into a feminist perspective on life and education (important for me as an academic), even to elements one might like to think were purely objective.

Some of these perspective don’t translate well to me, for example the notion of women (especially gay women) often having no sense of real identity because they haven’t been realistically represented in literature – the idea being that a gay woman would have no literary role models against which to judge her own feelings and value. As a science-inclined young boy, there were very few good scientist role models in literature either: plenty of “mad scientists”, “evil scientists”, and even overly dedicated and over-rational scientists, but none who did what it is we actually do as scientists. I’m not convinced that this literary lack did much to impact my sense of identity, I can accept that better models might help to make people’s choices more comprehensible to those around them.

4/5. Finished Saturday 21 February, 2015.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Charles Dickens (1842)

2/5. Finished Tuesday 17 February, 2015.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Robert Graves (1929)

The autobiography of one of the four main English-language poets of the First World War (the others being Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke) offers a fascinating insight into the first-hand experience of war – if a less fascinating insight into the poet’s life.

Graves is clear about the trauma, dirt, terror, and suffering of the war. His description of a battle at Loos sums-up the mindlessness of the experience: waiting, anticipation, false starts, screwing-up courage only to be knocked back. It’s hard to imagine anyone going through that and not being exhausted by the adrenaline. On the way he meets Sassoon, as well as Thomas Hardy, TE Lawrence, and various other figures of the literary times.

The rest of the book is less satisfying: his boyhood at Charterhouse perhaps prepared him for the capricious nature of war, in a way, while his later experiences at Oxford and elsewhere added little to my appreciation, apart from summoning-up a vague jealousy at some of his descriptions of intellectual society just after the War: it’s hard to imagine many of the conversations he describes happening now, with their deep classical allusions and assumptions of erudition on all sides.

Least satisfying is that to autobiography of a poet reveals so little about his poetic frame of mind. Graves doesn’t explore the what it means to be a poet, although he alludes to the “poetic tendency” often enough. It’s a surprisingly unrevealing book at a personal level: perhaps less intimately revealing than his poetry itself, in fact, but worth reading for its historical context.

3/5. Finished Saturday 24 January, 2015.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)