"Our heroine's biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a conscious blush to her cheek" (163)
He doesn't know why? Why make the reader question the author's own creation? And why purposefully organize sentences so uncomfortably as this: "Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded [a letter] away she saw Lord Warburton standing before her" (154).
Also, I'm sick of these perfect-looking and uniformly charming heroines: Natalya Rostov, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer. Get a fault. Elizabeth Bennet is not "uniformly charming," as Mr. Collins stammers: she is hasty and her decision outspeeds her judgment. She's real. Anna Karenina's perfectly formed, ivory arm; Natasha's every action being described as supple (maybe I can blame that on the translation); Isabel's charm and composure and appearance. They're the 19th-century equivalent of Jessica Wakefield.
I was hating Isabel for a while because damn, how could she be so stupid, but chapter 42 is one of the most skillful treatments of an invisible but tricky situation that I have ever read. After that I liked it better, and if I can’t adore a book based on only its last quarter, I can like it a lot. Nonetheless it’s probably the only James I’ll ever read.
Begun 28 June 2004.
Tuesday BJWL and I went to the Connecticut River Museum. That wasn't overly thrilling on its own but you can opt for a boat tour of the river, and this we took. The three floors of the museum were dedicated to Fenwick, bordered by River and Sound and most famous for Katharine Hepburn's long residence there; a discussion of the shipping and boat-building that helped the estuary towns flourish; and a series of photographs of Essex long ago and currently. The boat tour was wonderful. I had never been on a boat on the river, never seen the beautiful (and sometimes merely ostentatious) houses and estates on its banks, never gazed at my town from this angle.
Thirty years ago there were no ospreys in Connecticut at all; now there are at least 75 ospreys nests along this seven-mile stretch. This is thanks to Roger Tory Peterson stealing eggs from some less polluted southern shore. Eagles are more common in winter, and we didn't see any but did see many ospreys (hunting adults and begging nestlings), egrets, herons, cormorants, a school of agitated shad (I think that's what the guide said) and a deer. I learned that the Connecticut River is so shallow at its delta that it did not lend itself to industry, and that's why it's not befouled as the Quinnipiac in New Haven and the Thames in New London are. I learned that Selden Island is the largest in Connecticut at 610 acres and that stone quarried from its hill formed New York City sidewalks. I saw Brockway Landing, which during the years of quarrying serviced that business; and Joshua Rock, a sheer cliffy edifice from atop which Joshua, son of Uncas, watched his people fish in the river and the sun set opposite (I had never known for what Joshuatown Road was named). The boat turned around just south of Gillette Castle. It was a beautiful trip.
Selden Island
Joshua Rock
Gillette Castle on the hill
Abominable people whom I hate have built two houses on my ledge, an ugly one at the base near my house, and an okay one on the ledge proper. Fuckers. It does make me wonder if I would rather a contemporary with a longer view rather than the original Federal house right on the bank that has been mine for many years. Either way, the one I don't like has to go.
After a bite at Hallmark, I brought my mother home and returned to the lake for the late afternoon and early evening. Floating there, watching a sliver of a waxing moon rise, listening to birds and the wind in the leaves, feeling the water's cool embrace, that's what I went home for.