Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt by Kathleen B. Jones

Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt

by Kathleen B. Jones (the Other Kathleen Jones!)

‘This is the story of my thinking journey with Hannah, a tale at once political and personal, singular and common.  Diving below the surface of her writing, the narrative arches and bends, assembling vignettes about Hannah and me into a collage of life stories, a kind of intellectual and emotional scrapbook.’

That is how Kathleen B. Jones describes her unusual biography.  I read it with great interest - not only because it’s by my American name-sake, a writer, feminist and academic who has often covered similar ground, but also because I've followed the progress of the book on the internet for a couple of years, particularly the fraught process of publication.

Kathleen B. Jones is trained in political theory and a Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies at San Diego University, California.  But these days not even the phrase ‘leading academic’ means that you can get your work published by university presses, and the unusual structure of this book didn’t meet any of the academic norms.  Increasingly, ‘leading academics’ are turning to self-publishing to get their work in front of the public and it’s something to be grateful for.  One of the books I contributed to, published by Ashgate Press, is currently only available at a cover price of £56.00 - You can buy Diving for Pearls for a mere £7.97.

The book had its beginning in personal memoir.  Everyone wants to make sense of their lives, Kathleen B. Jones begins. ‘Some of us do that by telling a story’, but for Jones it was different.  ‘In the dusk of middle age, I chose a peculiar path.  Surprising myself by reversing directions, I took a road I’d abandoned, and found myself exploring again the thinking and life of Hannah Arendt’.

As a young woman, Hannah Arendt (1906-75) was a disciple (and lover) of the pro-Nazi German philosopher Martin Heidegger.  She was a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany to live in America, where she established herself as an eminent contemporary philosopher.  It was a title she often denied, choosing to describe herself instead as a ‘political theorist’.  She became the first female lecturer at Princeton and a fellow at Yale and was the subject of a 2012 film in Germany.

David Strathairn and Melissa Friedman as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt in Kate Fodor’s play ‘Hannah and Martin’.

Her views were often controversial - Arendt wrote a book on the Eichmann trial subtitled ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’ which criticised Jewish leaders for their actions during the Holocaust and appeared to suggest that the Nazis were not necessarily the monsters of popular thought - they were ordinary people who acquired power and did evil things because they didn’t think enough about what they were doing, and neither did the people who put them in power.  Evil can arise from mere thoughtlessness, unthinking conformity and obedience.  According to Arendt ‘it was “ordinary people,” neither stupid nor necessarily ideologically motivated, who committed the great atrocities of the Holocaust’.

Defining herself as both a German and a Jew, Arendt wrote about identity and human rights. She was very clear-sighted and pragmatic. ‘The right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself.  It is by no means certain whether this is possible’.  But Arendt’s insistence on retaining her German identity, the events of her own life, and particularly her relationship with Heidegger, gave her critics a great deal of fuel for their opposition.  Arendt described love as ‘perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces’.

Arendt was, as Jones points out - ‘A brilliant political philosopher, who refused to call herself a philosopher, a woman who never considered her sex an obstacle in her life, a Jew who was called anti-Semitic, and a rigorous thinker who wrote passionately about hatred and love’.  As a feminist and a writer, Jones found herself fascinated by the apparent contradictions in Arendt’s writing ‘no matter how much I argued against her, I had to admit I admired her writing . . . I found myself circling around and then diving deeper into Arendt’s writing , each time retrieving some pearl of insight, which shifted my understanding and made me reassess my position’.   Hannah Arendt’s voice became particularly insistent when Jones began to write a memoir of her own unusual and complex life.  ‘She wouldn’t leave me alone.  Every time I penned a line bordering on an all too confident assertion, I’d hear her voice in my head.  “Dive deeper, you’re not really thinking,” it said.’

The form of both Jones’ biography of Arendt and her own memoir changed as they merged into one - ‘a disquieting dialogue between two women one long ago dead, about what and how the heart knows yet prefers to keep to itself.  I let my imagination go visiting, entering her life and her work, and began to see the world and my own place in it from an altogether different perspective’.

The result is an unusual book - a thoughtful, penetrating (and sometimes painful) account of a life lived that uses the insights of this life to illuminate that of another. ‘I began to retrieve anecdotes from her life and mine, finding meanings in them I believe are more universal than applied only to my particular case’. What Jones learns from her experience informs her view of Hannah Arendt both as a woman and a philosopher and what Arendt wrote about herself teaches Jones how to think about her own.

One of the things that Jones learned was that the past is not necessarily ‘a set of events determining my present, as if one’s life was fully fashioned at its beginning, as if only time and circumstance were needed to create the equation that produced a person as its inevitable result.’  She abandoned the idea of Fatalism and accepted that a human being must admit their own limitations and ‘accept responsibility’ for what is theirs to control. Human beings are much more than ‘a leaf in the whirlwind of time’.

When Jones re-read Arendt’s book on Eichmann, it made her think ‘about monsters and the hold I’d let them have in my life’.  Reading about Jones’ monsters made me think about mine too and some of the terrible relationships and bad decisions I have had to take responsibility for.  That’s one of the things about this book - it makes you think, as both Jones and Arendt intended.

Jones is also interesting on the bias of the biographer - how we interpret the lives of the people we study according to events in our own.  Someone called Elzbieta Ettinger had previously written about Arendt’s life and used her subject’s relationship with Heidegger to provide the biographer herself ‘with a thinly veiled means of self-laceration, a confession, never made public of ever having become such a man’s prey’.  Ettinger had had a similar relationship.  As biographers we bring our own lives, our own judgements and prejudices to the text.

But there is more - Arendt’s position as an exiled German Jew makes Jones think about our own precarious position in an increasingly unstable world.  ‘We have all become refugees, wandering far from some imagined promised land of our ancestors, searching for a new way to be at home in a world where we might connect with and live with others with whom we have no evident or common ties binding us together as a people, except the shared fact of having been born.’ 

This book is indeed a thinking journey, written in beautiful prose, bringing together two women whose lives have made me think again about my own.  But beware, as Arendt warned, ‘There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity’.

You can find more about Kathleen B. Jones on her website here.

And you can buy Diving for Pearls on Amazon.co.uk

And in Paperback

And from Amazon.com

Country Girl: Edna O'Brien

Country Girl

by Edna O'Brien

Autobiography

Published by Faber and Faber

I was lucky enough to be sitting near to Edna O'Brien in the Green Room at a recent literature festival and she was holding the whole room spellbound with an anecdote about Philip Roth. She's a natural raconteur - the gift of the Irish, some would say.

I've always loved her writing - her first book The Country Girls (Country Girls Trilogy 1) was part of my growing up. But I haven't read anything of hers for some years. So this autobiography intrigued me. I found the first part of it gripping and saddening - the cruelty and emotional manipulation of young people in the name of religion makes me very angry. Her mother was a martyr and her father was an alcoholic. Between them and the nuns she grew up insecure and ill-equipped for life in the real world.

An early, disastrous marriage to a control freak who was also an author almost destroyed her. When she wrote her first novel and it was a runaway success, her marriage ended. 'You can write, and I will never forgive you,' he told her after he had read her book. She had to fight a three year court battle to get her children back.

But after the intensity of these first chapters, the narrative slips away into reminiscence. Memories go backwards and forwards in time and the reader is left looking for connections. There are some wonderful anecdotes - seductions by film stars, Princess Margaret dropping in for parties, a close friendship with Jackie Onassis - but it lacks a structure. I loved the writing - she is as lyrical as ever and I can hear her voice as I read the prose.

A flawed book, but she's always worth listening to.  One of the twentieth century's iconic writers.

Country Girl
Edna O'Brien
 

Nuala O'Faolain: Are You Somebody?

Nuala O’Faolain’s novel, 'My Dream of You' has been one of my favourite books since I read it. I remember being very sad when I heard that she had died, because there would be no more books. So it was with great delight that I spotted her autobiography ‘Are you Somebody’ at the Wellington second hand book fair. It didn’t disappoint. It was as honest, painful and lyrically written as the novel. No matter that it tells a story familiar from much Irish literature - the alcoholic mother, the inadequate father, the nine children, poverty, religion - what Nuala does in this book is much more than that. In telling her own story, she tells the story of Ireland itself - a particular period of its history. When she comments in the epilogue, ‘Today my father would simply have been jailed for his cruelty to his children’, she has already provided the answer; ‘There was an Ireland, a whole society, that in those times allowed such things’.

Nuala’s struggle to become a writer, and the tussle with her own biology, were the two threads of narrative I empathised with most, since I spent my own young life wrestling those particular monsters and I didn’t find feminism very helpful. Nuala managed, by accident rather than design, to avoid marriage and have a career in broadcasting and journalism. But she always felt inadequate. She had been brought up, as I was, to perceive marriage and children as the apex of any woman’s aspirations. ‘An old Ireland was ending in the 1960s. There were new possibilities. But what arrangement you came to with what kind of man was still the most important question by far for a woman.’ Nuala’s mother wrote to her as she studied at university: ‘I don’t really care if you get a degree or not..... I’d far rather see you with a husband and a few kids.’ And marriage then, meant the end of any kind of ambition. There were few role models for the married career woman.
‘It was to be another twenty years, at least, before a wife might be perceived as herself as well as an appendage of her husband’s. To be a wife and hope to have a career taken with the seriousness of your husband’s career, was hardly possible......’

The woman who was a friend of Philip Larkin, P.J. Kavanagh, David Lodge, was the lover of art critic Clement Greenberg - among many others - and who lived for 15 years with civil rights activist Nell McCafferty, remains at the end of the book alone and still vulnerable, still looking for love as the solution to the problem of Life, the Universe and Everything. Perhaps if you are not loved as a child, no one (not even yourself) can love you enough. Nuala quotes Adrienne Rich’s poem

You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains
posters            a pile of animals on the bed
A woman and a man who love you
and each other       slip the door ajar
you are almost asleep      they crouch in turn
to stroke your hair      you never wake

This happens every night for years
This never happened .....

Nuala writes - ‘what the poem does it to offer unhappy children somewhere to belong. It puts us, who happen to be Irish and women, into a wider context. And there, we belong. There, we find we are speaking a mother-tongue’.

What the book did was to make me incandescent with anger at a culture, a religion, that allowed the widespread abuse of children - not just in the church, but in the home. Nuala writes continually about wives being told by priests to go home and obey their husbands - wives whose husbands beat them, who impregnated them year after year after year until they were overwhelmed with children they couldn’t love or even care for properly. Nuala’s 9 year old brother ran away from home and lived in an alleyway for three days and no one even noticed. And I was angry at a catholic church that prepared girls for life in the second half of the twentieth century by telling them that in whatever situation they might find themselves, they ‘should think what the Virgin Mary would have done and do the same’. The irony of their advice about following the most famous unmarried mother of all, doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.
Nuala O’Faolain died of cancer in 2008.

William Fiennes: The Music Room

William Fiennes has somehow escaped me until now - maybe because autobiography isn’t one of my favourite genres, except when it’s a person I’m really interested in. But I saw the Snow Geese reviewed on another book blog (Dovegreyreader, who raved about it) and then found the Music Room in a remaindered book shop for £2.99.

I read it quickly - it’s refreshingly short - and with more pleasure than almost anything else I’ve read in a long time. The prose is beautiful and the way he takes readers into the world of the child is perfectly done. I can’t believe it’s only his second book.

William Fiennes was brought up in a moated castle (Broughton in Oxfordshire) though it’s never named in the book. Apparently he wanted every reader to imagine their own perfect castle as they read (interview here). But although his childhood was more privileged than most, he was lonely, being about 10 years younger than his nearest siblings. The castle became his playground, the film set for his imagination.

The family’s outwardly idyllic existence was overshadowed by tragedy. An older brother, Thomas, had been killed aged 3 in a freak accident before William was born. His eldest brother, Richard, suffered severe epilepsy that left him brain-damaged and sometimes violent. One of the most poignant moments in the book is the one where William comes round the corner of a secluded part of the garden -

“I saw Dad standing next to the house, his right arm stretched out, palm pressed flat against a buttress, his head dropped. He didn’t move.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

He said he was asking the house for some of its strength.”

The book also explores the murky history of epilepsy and the effect that it has had on families and communities over the centuries, being associated either with witchcraft or divine revelation. I couldn’t help thinking about the ‘lost prince’, George V’s son John, who was hidden away from the public gaze until he died at the age of 13. William Fiennes’ brother survives into adult-hood, but the effect on the family is profound.  One reviewer called the book 'jaw-droppingly beautiful'  and it is.

Reading Alan Bennett

I’m just reading Alan Bennett’s account of his relationship with his parents, ‘A Life Like Other People’s’, published in 2009. His style is unique; Radio 4, perfectly pitched, and the very essence of ‘northernness’ is in the vocabulary, the flattened vowels in the rhythm of the prose. His voice establishes an affectionate intimacy with the reader. For a homesick northerner it’s as if you’re listening to a favourite uncle, reading you a bedtime story.
I can hear the echo of my grandparents’ voices, Harry and Lizzie, born in the Irish ghettos of Carlisle and brought up with the language of their adopted country. I can still hear my grandfather say to his wife, (who is once again ‘in a bit of a state’), ‘Now then, mother....’, his tone one you would adopt for an over-excited dog, his impatience and exasperation cloaked in resignation. My grandmother wears, like Alan Bennett’s mother, a duster coat, or perhaps a little two piece from C & A. She aspired to Binns, but could rarely afford the prices. She wore glasses with a little diamante exclamation mark at the corners, and always put on a hat even if she was going across the street for a loaf of bread.
Reading Alan Bennett, I’m pitched back into my grandparents' council house on a newly built estate, a sneering teenager poking ridicule at the crocheted crinoline dolls that covered the toilet rolls. On the sideboard were strange crocheted fruit bowls which you had to soak in sugar water and then dry over a basket until they were stiff. She crocheted hats too - which were then stretched over a specially bought ‘shape’, which I think she had ‘sent off for’ as a special offer from Woman and Home magazine. She was obsessively houseproud. Mrs Bennett’s litany of buckets and cloths and mops - each with a separate purpose - was repeated in my grandmother’s house. When she bought a new sofa the plastic cover was only taken off for family ‘dos’ or when the vicar came to call. Her particular enemy was the damp - you could die, she told me, from a chill caught in an unaired bed. She once burnt my grandfather’s Sunday jacket while airing it in front of the gas fire before he put it on.
But unlike Alan Bennett’s home, theirs was a cold, loveless house. If my grandfather ever ventured to show her affection she would shrink away and say ‘Don’t be silly, Harry!’ She told my mother once, while I played on the floor, wide-eyed and all ears, that she ‘couldn’t be doing with It. I put a stop to it after our May was born.’ Sad.

Sad too, Alan Bennett’s tale of repression in post-war Leeds; family secrets that concerned - not aberrant sexuality - but mental illness and its consequences. His account of his mother’s slow slide into depression and then dementia is gentle and humorous as well as tragic.
You can get tired of his style - though this book is too short to cloy. It’s a beautifully told memoir that also gives a frank account of the autobiographical sources for his many plays, sketches and books. Like ‘Talking Heads’ it’s a monologue that reveals as much about the narrator as it does about the subject of the story.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY - FACT AND FACTION

Just finished Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock. This is very different from her previous short story collections because it's rooted in her family history and the memories of her own childhood and more recent past. In the introduction Alice Munro underlines the way we shape the narratives of our lives into stories when we're reminiscing, editing and embellishing them, obedient to the templates of story-telling we absorb as children. She writes about the process of researching her family's origins and writing about her ancestors; 'I put all this material together over the years, and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something like stories. Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be.' She traces her family history from the bleak austerities of eighteenth century Scotland to twenty first century Canada in a series of thoughtful explorations of the conflicts between landscape and character, individual and circumstance. But in the end what she writes is not fact but fable - 'These are stories' she insists, adding, 'You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does.'





Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast: the Restored Version
I didn't realise that the version published in the 60s after Hemingway committed suicide had been significantly edited by his publisher and his fourth wife. Now Hemingway's grandson has found the original manuscript and published it as it stands. That doesn't mean it's how Hemingway would have published it, but at least it's how it was written.

There's a steamy, glowering photograph of Hemingway on the cover and it looks satisfyingly retro. It's a memoir of the author's early years in Paris in the nineteen twenties with his first wife. He talks about his relationship with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, (who kept a supply of opium for a friend), F. Scott Fitzgerald (usually drunk), Ford Madox Ford (who had halitosis), the terrifying Gertrude Stein, and the proprietor of the Shakespeare bookshop, Sylvia Beach. There's even a glimpse of Aleister Crowley striding past in the street, and Scott Fitzgerald's wife Zelda gets a minor role - mad and bad at Juan les Pins. In between these encounters we are treated to Hemingway's thoughts on underwear, sex, boxing, racing, french food and french toilets, and the way a writer converts experience into copy - input and output.

Even more interesting than the vignettes is the way Hemingway writes about the process of writing - or rather, becoming a writer. One of the sections that his wife originally deleted is a musing on the pitfalls of writing in the 1st person. This is fascinating because big chunks of the memoir were deliberately written by H in the second person 'you' and that was altered by his wife, who converted the whole manuscript back to the first person. He spent quite a lot of time writing in cafès, partly to get out of the small flat he shared with his wife and baby, and partly because he found the atmosphere conducive to writing. They were 'transitional places' and he found it easier in one place, to write about another. He watched people and listened to their conversations . He had particular working rules 'I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.' He would then go and do something completely different; 'I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything.'

There's always a perspective in memoir. This is an old man writing about a young man's life with the disadvantage of knowing how it all turned out in the end. The Hemingway who wrote this was a wounded animal, though he was scarcely into his sixties. His painful references to the failure of his memory (after Electric Shock Treatment) and loss of confidence in his own ability to continue writing, were excised in the original version by his wife and publisher - here they are given as they were written. The result is a more chaotic account of his years in Paris, more confessional than you'd expect from Hemingway, but also - perhaps - just a little closer to how that period of his life was actually lived.

Second-hand Treasure Trove

Charity bookshop trawls can throw up some unexpected treasures. Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino was published back in the 70s, and it was so surreal I didn't know quite what to make of it at first. It's a brilliant satire on writing that most writers will enjoy. I loved the way the characters get so fed up with the author, and the dreadful book he's working on, that they try to plot their own way out of the story. I really liked the idea that characters from books live in a separate dimension where they are constantly looking for employment in other books by other authors. There are quite a lot of stories within stories, some of which are so bizarre and strange I was tempted to skip (but I would have missed some real treasures!). Halpin, the main character's, diary is a good antidote to the tedious chapters of the novel and the author's journal is such a send up I couldn't keep from smiling. His letters to publishers and critics are hilarious. There are some really good examples of 'how not to write' which I can use with creative writing students. The whole thing is wierd and bizarre, but incredibly well written. The 'author' is so pretentious and awful I can't help but feel I've met him.

Also in my second-hand book swoop was The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler. How good she is. The writing is brilliant - the way she weaves the story, the dialogue, the characters. And yet it's quiet, not showy.


My New Zealand publishers sent me a book by another of their authors, Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova It's a wonderful memoir about growing up in communist Bulgaria, moving to the West as a teenager and then going back after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It captures perfectly the tragedy of communism, and the cultural schizophrenia that so many suffered from afterwards. She writes beautiful prose and is also a very good poet. I just missed her at the Edinburgh Festival and wish now that I'd been able to make it.