Reading: Maud Hart Lovelace

Moving: feeling gloomy

21 March 2000: Betsy Amy and Jo

On Saturday at the Field branch of DPL, I got another stack of children's books. Lots of Anastasia books by Lois Lowry, which I read in a glut that permitted me to break my rules about finishing series in order. The antepenultimate and penultimate Betsy-Tacy books. Paddle-to-the-Sea, an early Newbery winner. M.C. Higgins, the Great. I read Anastasia steadily through Sunday evening, started M.C. Higgins, the Great, and was promptly unenthused, Newbery or not.

So I began Betsy and Joe instead, since I knew I could whip through that in a flurry of hairpins. Reading the later Betsy-Tacy books is like reading the later Anne of Green Gables books (not that I have), in that you're just waiting for Anne to marry whoever that boy is. Except that he dies, doesn't he? And doesn't John Brooke die in Little Men? More stuff I haven't read. Reading Jane Austen is arguably just as bad, since you're just waiting for somebody to marry someone. Jane Austen has a bit more flair than Lovelace, though.

Lovelace mimics not Jane Austen, though, but Louisa May Alcott, at least in Betsy and the Great World. Betsy on her Grand Tour is a perfect amalgation of Jo and Amy. The earlier Betsy-Tacy books are illustrated by Lois Lenski, I think, or whoever did the pre-Garth Williams editions of the Little House books (Center School, my elementary school, had such an edition of Farmer Boy. It was wretched. Gimme Garth Williams). As soon as Betsy and Tacy begin to be young ladies, there's a different illustrator. In sum, when the characters age to the point they need a Gibson illustrator, you can stop reading. Not that I will; I am going to seek out Betsy's Wedding and be done with it.

Anyway, Betsy and the Great World. Lovelace skipped three years--Tacy's marriage, Carny's marriage (not to Larry), the Rays' move to Minneapolis, la di da as if these don't matter, and particularly Betsy at the U. But Betsy at the U means Betsy at school without Joe, who's at Harvard, and by this point apparently Betsy as a character can't be interesting unless she's interacting with Joe. Or at least missing Joe, as she does throughout this penultimate book.

I read somewhere that Louisa May Alcott was reluctant to write Good Wives, the second novel that is usually bundled with Little Women. Little Women ends with Meg's marriage; it's Good Wives that has Beth's death and Amy's and Jo's marriages. Whatever I read quoted Alcott as flatly refusing to marry Jo to Laurie, no matter who wanted it. She might have just said, "Oh, she marries a rector," and maybe everyone would've shut up. No, that was Catherine Bennet's eventual spouse in Pride and Prejudice.

So anyway, Betsy cf Jo and Amy:

* Okay, that's one similarity between Lovelace and Austen: the two older sisters are more prominent than the third, named Margaret. But in Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, the elder, is the protagonist.

** I mean really, not a problem at all. Her father runs a shoe-store in Deep Valley--perhaps the move to Minneapolis was a movin' on up as well--yet Betsy leads a gentrified life in Europe.

*** Oh, that's right--when Jo's at home, she writes in her garret, and Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle writes in her towers and attics and atop mottes.

MTV or VH-1 is doing a faux rockumentary about the creation of a boy band, and how there are five necessary characters in the boy band: the shy one, the older brother, the bad boy, the cute one, and the other one I forget. Perhaps the Bennets, Marches, Rays, and Ingalls girls, by their similar numbers, are constrained in their characters.

I'm a dreadful gossip and am going to read Betsy's Wedding with pleasure. But the only part of Betsy and the Great World I read with admiration or any sense of gaining anything (hellooooo lisa, it's a children's book!) was the last chapter. It is 1914, and in Munich in early spring there seemed to be lots of soldiers and in Paris in early summer Betsy idly reads about some archduke or other who's been assassinated. Betsy's safely in London by late July when the tension can no longer be ignored. (Again, Lovelace has made it perfectly safe for her character by getting Betsy out of Bavaria well in time, which is also why I knew Margaret wouldn't die.)

So as all London rallies, and as women sew shirts and men sign up, and as everyone prays feverishly and believes it'll all be over by Christmas, Americans from all over Europe flood into England and thence homeward. Lovelace's portrayal of British patriotism and loyalty stirred me as well as the panic of the Usans. I know a few weeks elapsed between Archduke Ferdinand's deaths and the domino declarations of the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, and that everyone but us was in it by August, and I know Belgium got squashed right off, and I know about going over the top and No Man's Land and the Battles of Verdun and the Somme, and I've read Pat Barker and All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms but as far as first-hand accounts (even young adult novel accounts) of the social history of the outbreak, I know little. Reading about crowds thronging Buckingham Palace so the king and queen might know the people support them, and about a weeping woman declaring in Westminster Abbey that no Kaiser'll succeed against her Bob, touches me.

Which is one reason I really like the opening scene of "Hope and Glory." A typical late summer Sunday morning, with Billy playing with his tin soldiers in the backyard and Susie on her tricycle and the clacking of reel lawnmowers, and then, the announcement, with everything getting very solemn and Billy faintly aware nothing will ever be the same again.

As in "Saving Private Ryan": Spielberg captured D-Day's horrific suffering and outstanding courage with military accuracy and superb cinematic technique, sure, but the scene I really like comes later. A woman stands at her kitchen sink, washing dishes. We see her through a window in which hang four stars, one for each son serving in arms, and upon which we see the reflection of a car approaching through rolling farmland. As the car draws up to the house and she goes to the door, she knows. But when not only a man in uniform but also a priest in robes emerge from the car, she knows, and she collapses, slowly against the doorframe, to the floor.

That I like, and that is the social, domestic perspective on war that that last chapter of Betsy and the Great World gives.