I Happily Track Down a Literary Memory.

For some reason, I’m not sure why, I’ve been thinking recently about the novel . . . And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer, pictured above signing copies of her book and enjoying the acclaim that it garnered.  She was 89 years old and living in a nursing home, but she hadn’t lost any of her spunk.  About the sales of the book she said, “I have no plans for the money . . . but it’ll be awfully nice to have it” and “Ninety percent of the hoopla is because I’m such an old lady.”  There’s a whole long backstory about how the novel gained recognition, but you can look that up for yourself. (Read an excellent article about her life here.)  Her story is encouraging to anyone who thinks it’s too late in life to do anything significant.  Sort of a Grandma Moses story, only in literature.

Briefly put, the plot of . . . And Ladies concerns a fictional small town in Ohio and the changes it goes through in the years between the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression.  What may have brought the novel to my mind is that America right now seems on such a knife edge, so poised to go one way or another, and her book reminds its readers that indeed that’s always the case, in all lives.  I remember reading it and thinking what a masterful job she had done of showing how change comes, how it creeps in gradually and suddenly you look up and everything is different.  That’s a very poor description, I’m afraid.  It’s hard to do justice in a short blogpost to a 1,334-page saga. (Yes, it really is that long. And no one has done an audiobook, I’m afraid.  You could read it in short segments, though.)

Anyway, I have always remembered a specific scene, and today I decided to see if I could track it down online. This type of detective work used to involve a trip to the library.  Nowadays, of course, many books are available in their entirety through Google books, but they have to be in the public domain, and this one isn’t.  The other option, if the book is on Amazon, is to use their “look inside” tool and search the book.  That doesn’t always work, since a book has to have a digital version in order for this action to be possible.  (The book doesn’t have to be available for sale digitally; ALOTC is not available on Kindle or as a ebook, but it has to have an online image.  I’m not sure how that works and I’m not going to look it up.  We’ll just leave it at that.)  You have to know a key word or words used sparingly enough so that you don’t just get every page of the book in your search result.  And not every page is available for search, since if you can just read the entire book that way there’s no reason for you to buy it.

I knew the scene took place in the town’s library, a big project for the women’s book club whose members are the main characters (sounds boring, but it’s not) and that it was a masterful piece of writing.  Anne, the wife of the town doctor through whose eyes we see much of the novel’s action, is working in the library on a dark, cold, sleety afternoon.  I remember reading the passage and feeling a great foreboding.  Something was about to happen, but I didn’t know what.  She keeps working, shelving the books in the space the women have managed to acquire, as it gets later and darker and colder.  The fire goes out.  Her husband has told her that he’ll come back by and pick her up after his office hours, and to wait for him and not try to go home on her own in the terrible weather.  He has left her his old heavy cloak, so she slips it on and puts her hands into the pockets.  And her fingers encounter . . . a note.  It sounds so cliched, doesn’t it?  I wish I could just quote you the entire scene, but I can’t.  I can give you a little taste of it, though, as Santmyer the author has Anne her character comment indirectly on the nature of the situation:

Nothing, of a sudden, seemed real.  It was not in real life that wives found notes from other women in their husband’s pockets.   . . It was only in cliche-filled, banal novels.  Dizzily she tipped her head back and looked at the top shelf.  Was it possible that such things were put into such novels–Ought We to Visit Her? and Cast Away in the Cold–because they did happen in real life?  

What does Anne do?  I guess you’ll have to read the book to find out.  It’s not what you would expect.

Finding this passage made me very happy and reminded me, once again, of how real some fictional characters are to me. But maybe right now I should end this post, say good-bye to Anne, and go downstairs to see how my husband is doing with his installation of the recalcitrant new dishwasher.  I will never get a window into his mind that way I do with Anne, or Jo March, or Lord Peter Wimsey. Another flesh-and-blood human being is forever mysterious to me, as I am to him.  But I can at least make the attempt to understand him and his current frustration.  I’ve often retreated into books at the expense of the real world.  But surely there’s room for both in my life!