Reading Literature under the Gun

This evening I will be moderating a Leonardtown Library conversation about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  It’s an enjoyable novel that is perfect for book discussion groups since it’s about a book discussion group.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is set up during the German occupation of Guernsey (an English island off the coast of Normandy) during World War II.  The book tells us that Hitler is so excited to have conquered a part of Great Britain that the occupation is fairly extensive, even though Guernsey doesn’t have a great deal of strategic importance.  Slave workers are brought in to fortify the defenses, and penalties are harsh for islanders who break rules.

One of these rules is that one’s pigs have to be turned over to the Germans when they are grown. But a hidden pig is served at a secret feast one evening, and the returning partiers are discovered returning home after curfew. They convince the authorities that they have been attending a literary society and then proceed to set one up to cover their tracks.  Throughout the rest of the war, they regularly meet over potato peel pie to discuss literature.  Some of them have done little reading in the past.

The novel’s major character is Juliet Ashton, who wrote a popular newspaper column during the war and and is now looking for a subject for a new book (the year is 1946).  Out of nowhere she gets a note from one Dawsey Adams, Guernsey resident, who has come into possession of a book of essays by Victorian writer Charles Lamb that she once owned (her name and address are on the flyleaf).  He loves the book and is looking for more books by and about Lamb.  She is charmed by the letter, they begin a correspondence, and she learns about the literary society.

At one point she voices an idea that I think has a deep truth to it:

I wonder how the book got to Guernsey?  Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.  How delightful if that were true.

When I read the passage, I had just been sharing a similar idea with Farida Bag, a Ugandan reader of this blog.  I have noted that sometimes the book we need at a particular time somehow finds us.  As we are running our finger along a library or bookstore shelf, it is as though the book selects us.  I will write more on this in a later post.

Anyway, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society speaks to the themes of this website by showing how literature comes to the aid of people in dire straits.  The first half of the book has members of the literary society writing Juliet about their experiences during the war.  (The entire book is told through letters.) Here are some great examples of how literature enters in:

–Eben Ramsey has fallen in love with Shakespeare, especially the line, “The bright day is done, and we are for the dark” (from the concluding act of Antony and Cleopatra).  As he observes,

I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor!  All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over.  If I could have thought the words “the bright day is done and we are for the dark,” I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.

The phrase does go on to console him for the remainder of the occupation, however.

–Clovis Fossey has feelings for the Widow Hubert but finds himself being edged out by Ralph Murchey, even though Murchey only wants the widow’s grazing land for his cows.  But he hears Murchey saying that women can be wooed by poetry and decides to try it out.  He discovers that Wordsworth provides good material:

Anyway, I did win the hand of the Widow Hubert—my Nancy.  I got her to go for a walk along the cliffs one evening, and I said, “Lookie here, Nancy.  The gentleness of Heaven broods o’er the sea—Listen, the might Being is awake.”  She let me kiss her.  She is now my wife.”

–Fossey is also a World War I vet and appreciates the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.  In a comic passage, he questions the poetic credentials of William Butler Yeats:

Mrs. Maugery lent me a book last week.  It’s called The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935.  They let a man named Yeats make the choosings.  They shouldn’t have. Who is he—and what does he know about verse?

I hunted all through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.  There weren’t any—nary a one.  And do you know why not?  Because this Mr. Yeats said—he said, “I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War I.  I have a distaste for them.  Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.”

Passive Suffering?  Passive Suffering!  I nearly seized up.  What ailed the man?  Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” [“Anthem for Doomed Youth”] What’s passive about that, I’d like to know.  That’s exactly how they do die.  I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr. Yeats.

Yeats, of course, is one of the great modern poets.  But as a symbolist, an anti-English Irish nationalist, and (by the time he compiled The Oxford Book of Modern Verse) a reactionary, he would not have been thrilled by the hard-hitting social commentary of the World War I poets.  Fossey’s criticism has some legitimacy.

–John Booker drives everyone in the society crazy because he will only read and talk about one book: the letters of the Roman writer Seneca. (“They are begging me to read someone else.  But I’ll not do it.”)  But Seneca’s stoic philosophy appears to give him strength to survive a concentration camp.  For instance, when describing the horrors he has seen and experienced, he says,

I’ll write no more of this, and I hope you’ll understand if I do not care to speak of it.  As Seneca says, “Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.”

–And finally, free spirit Isola Pribby finds a kindred spirit in Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights:

I like stories of passionate encounters, but now I can picture one.  I didn’t like Wuthering Heights at first, but the minute that specter, Cathy, scrabbled her bony fingers on the window glass—I was grasped by the throat and not let go.  With that Emily I could hear Heathcliff’s pitiful cries upon the moors.  I don’t believe that after reading such a fine writer as Emily Bronte, I will be happy to read again Miss Amanda Gillyflower’s Ill-Used by Candlelight.  Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

It’s also interesting to see what books Isola chooses to burn for kindling:

Amelia told us you would like to know about our book society and what we talk about at our meetings.  I gave a talk on the Bronte girls once when it was my turn to speak. I’m sorry I can’t send you my notes on Charlotte and Emily—I used them to kindle a fire in my cookstove, there being no other paper in the house.  I’d already burn up my tide tables, the Book of Revelation, and the story about Job.

In other words, she throws out scientific predictions, apocalyptic futures, and tales of suffering.  She chooses to live instead as Cathy does: in the moment.

There’s something about non-readers falling in love with books that warms my heart. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society speaks to my deep faith that, if you give literature a chance, there’s no telling what kind of magic it can pull off.