Fearing a different outcome in the presidential election, I was going to write about genius and Virginia Woolf this morning, but I should have to be one or the other to do so. My thoughts are flying every which-way, half elated by Barack Obama’s victory and half jittered by the impending storm. There’s no reason to expect any storm damage in the immediate neighborhood, but it’s much to soon for even a prediction of high winds.

Instead of following the news last night, Kathleen and I had a quiet dinner and then read for a few hours. I’m on the fourth and final lap of Elizabeth Taylor’s stories (those gathered in her last collection, The Devastating Boys), and two stood out yesterday, “Sisters” and “Miss A and Miss M.” The first is on the short side, only a few pages; but an entire novel is compressed within it. A respectable widow is horrified to learn that she has been tracked down by a “literary detective” who wants to ask her about her late sister, a once-famous novelist whose scandalous books were incinerated by their clergyman father. To a thrilling degree, Taylor conveys the urgency with which the housewife has buried her connection to the writer. In lesser hands, the woman would be a philistine figure of fun, but Taylor makes us weigh the cost of literary production that writers exact in the form of indiscretion. The longer one, one of the very few narrated in the first person, is about a schoolgirl who has a crush on a schoolteacher whose wittiness masks selfish cruelty. It is a model story, saturated in skill.

Is there, I wonder, a good book about Victorian geniuses?

***

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2012 at 12:08 pm.