JANUARY READING

I found a couple of Kathleen Norris collections on Kindle, each containing a half dozen or so novels, and very cheap.

Which is good, because after reading The Heart of Rachael and The Beloved Woman I’ve really gone off this writer.
Though she was an admirable trailblazer in many ways – a best-selling female author, socially and politically aware, a pacifist, supporting votes for women, committed to assisting families living in poverty –  she was also a devout Catholic. Which meant she was passionately opposed to divorce and to birth control, and used her books to promote her conservative views. One of her early books, Mother, even captured the attention of the President, Theodore Roosevelt, for its pro-family (large families, that is) message. The Heart of Rachael contains several full-on rants which seem to blame women for what Norris sees as the moral decline of the age. The Beloved Woman, while not quite as blatant, contrasts the pure, happy, wholesome working-class family with a miserable lot of decadent rich folks. There’s a pretty sickening denouement where the heroine, after having her head turned by a caddish married man, stages a dramatic last-minute reconciliation with her frankly cloddish husband. She renounces a massive inheritance, accompanies him West for work and vows to be a dear little housewife and helper in future.

The other reason I’ve gone off Kathleen Norris is because of her support for America First. We’re hearing that phrase these days on the lips of Donald Trump, but originally the America First Committee was a highly influential pressure group, active 1940-41, dedicated to keeping America out of WWII in Europe. One of its most famous members was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was openly a Nazi sympathiser. To see a photo of Kathleen Norris on a stage in Madison Square Garden, next to Lindbergh, giving what appears to be a Nazi salute, is off-putting, that’s for sure.

In the last days of January I also read Crypt by Professor Alice Roberts. Subtitled Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond, it was not a comforting book. However, I learned a lot about ethnic cleansing in Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Black Death, leprosy, the establishment of  hospitals after the Norman invasion, the destruction of Becket’s shrine at Canterbury and the remarkably robust bones of the English archers who drowned when Henry VIII’s prized ship, the Mary Rose, sank. The facts that have stayed with me are few, sadly – can I blame the hot weather? – but I will always remember that I can only catch leprosy from other human beings and from banded armadillos, and that the Mary Rose had a brother ship, called the Peter Pomegranate.

Both these facts are now tucked away in the trivia department of my brain –  forever.