Fran Presents E.M.Delafield

Jacquie's Email Notice 

Sept 25 - Hello Literary Ladies! I know this is what I plan on wearing for our Zoom meeting on Wednesday, September 30th at 1pm for Fran's presentation, "Motherhood, Work, Laughter: E.M. Delafield." How about you?

Fran will be sending pre-assigned readings ahead of her presentation, so please let her know if you are NOT able to attend. (This will cut down on the number of emails Fran will receive.) Have a lovely weekend! Jacquie

Barbara's Minutes 

Query: Could a Zoom meeting, like the Literature Club meeting of September 30, be re-created as a comedy of manners? The writer of these minutes wonders how the Provincial Lady, the leading character in the novels in today’s presentation, would have managed it. Perhaps she might have made a note to self about how lovely Diana Jaeger looked wearing a fascinator, but with a rueful acknowledgment that if she got one, the effect might not be the same. Or could she have developed something out of the list of books we recommended during our book chat, which ranged from Anna Karenina to the new collection of stories by Edwidge Danticat? Surely, she would have passed over in silence that the minutes were accepted as read and the treasury was again at $285.67.

Fran Greenberg captured in her presentation the light yet observant touch of the English writer E.M. Delafield, who created in Diary of a Provincial Lady an immensely charming character, whose life was filled with mishaps that she faced with an unfailing sense of the comic. As Fran said, the Provincial Lady confesses to the petty emotions which really drive our lives. She finds her children baffling and sometimes annoying, her husband a silent enigma; she is intimidated both by her cook and by the know-it-all Lady Box; and she struggles to conceal how tiresome she finds many of her neighbors.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady was serialized in the left-leaning, feminist magazine Time and Tide, and published as a collection in 1930. It was an immediate best seller. Delafield followed it up with three more volumes, but Fran commented that the only Provincial Lady that rivals the liveliness of the Diary is The Provincial Lady in Wartime. Delafield influenced other writers who wrote about the domestic front, including Shirley Jackson, whom Laura Rice presented at our previous meeting.

Fran shared details of Delafield’s not always easy life, and of her literary output, which included serious novels and criticism. We then delighted in reading passages from Diary of a Provincial Lady.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Laura Presents Betty MacDonald and Shirley Jackson

Jacquie's Email Notice

Sept 9: Hello Literary Ladies! It is with great pleasure that I welcome you all to the first email reminder of the inaugural meeting of the Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson's 2020-2021 season. When choosing our theme for this year, "Comedy, Humor, and Satire," we were still in the early days of this annus horribilis, but now I think we can all agree that we are certainly deserving of a few laughs, snickers, and even some guffaws, so let the games begin!

First up is Laura Rice who will be presenting on Wednesday, September 16th at 1pm via Zoom on "Betty MacDonald, Shirley Jackson, Tina Fey: Laughing While Living." One thing to do and one thing to know: Please let Laura know if you will be attending so that she can assign readings. Early next week she will send out the file. You can then choose to print it all out, print just your part, or have the text available on another device. So fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night,* but one I believe we will all enjoy together! See you next week on the big screen, Jacquie 

 

*That came out of nowhere. See Tina Fey meme above.

Barbara's Minutes 

The first Zoom meeting of the Lit Club for this program year began with brief updates from members. Some of us have recently visited our families for the first time during the pandemic, and many of us have children and grandchildren just returning to school, remotely or not. A few find refreshment in birding, and several are engaged in writing postcards to get out the vote. All are anxious about the political situation.

President Fran Greenberg rang the meeting to order and began by thanking VP/Program Chair Connie Stewart for this year’s splendid booklet. She welcomed Isabel (Izzy) Stephens, Louisa Stephens’s daughter, as a guest to our meeting. The minutes were accepted as read and the treasury reported at $285.67. Soon the Club will vote on an amount to donate to the Hastings Public Library.

Presenter Laura Rice revealed to us that the humorous autobiographical tales of the American authors Betty MacDonald and Shirley Jackson were her introduction to adult literature at the age of 11, when she found Jackson’s memoir Life Among the Savages (1953) and MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) and The Egg and I (1945) among her mother’s books. 

Each in our Zoom bubble we settled down to read selections from these works, beginning with Jackson’s account of her son’s early school days, when he proved himself a spellbinding story teller, and her hilarious trip to a department store with her young daughter and her daughter’s five imaginary friends. Then we turned to MacDonald’s chronicle of all the jobs her sister Mary thought up for her, culminating with Mary triumphantly maneuvering her into writing her first book. We concluded by reading from that book, The Egg and I, her bestselling memoir about her early married life on a chicken ranch in Washington State, where she learned that the hen is the boss.

Laura called her presentation “Laughing While Living,” but how can I capture Laura’s laugh in these minutes? As if she were hearing these stories for the first time, she laughed in hearty, exuberant bursts, and she made us feel for a time that the world was right side up after all.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Humor, Comedy and Satire: Program 2020-2021

"...a fear of being trapped by domesticity and baby carriages..."

This year's booklet cover is an illustration by James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960), from Pelham, New York. He was a contemporary of the Literature Club's founders, who first met more than a century ago and who might have agree with the sentiments expressed in his cartoon.

We chose this year's topic knowing well what a difficult year this was going to be.

This winter, we are foregoing the usual rounds of parties and family get-togethers in the interest of not being COVID spreaders. The days are short, it's cold and we're lonely. We are meeting on Zoom (see photo in post Dec 14 2020: Social Distancing, Masks, Quarantines). We are being consoled by writers of comedy, humor and satire, and by hearing each others' presentations. 

Here's who's doing what, in the program year 2020-2021:

                    Laura: Betty MacDonald, Shirley Jackson, Tina Fey: Laughing While Living (Sept 16)

Frances: E.M. Delafield: Motherhood, Work, Laughter (Sept 30)

Louisa: The Writing Behind Screwball Comedies (Oct 21)

Christine: Samuel Becket plays (Oct 28)

Lori: Political Satire: Catch 22, Brave New World and Slaughterhouse 5 (Nov 18)

Diana: Bailey White (Dec 9)

Barbara: Shakespeare's Fools (Jan 6)

Joanna: Uncommon Writer: Alan Bennett (Jan 20)

Carol: James Thurber (Feb 3) 

Jacqueline: Neil Simon (Feb 24)

Annual Meeting (Mar 10)

Constance: Dawn Powell (Mar 24)

Linda: Roz Chast: Existential Angst (Apr 14)

Gita: Peter Mayle (Apr 28)

Carla: Calvin Trillin (May 12)

 

 

 

 

 

Reading List from 2020 Annual Picnic

We met on July 29, under a large black walnut tree in the field behind Christine's house. Christine warned us that direct hits by falling walnuts was possible. Nothing fell, there were no injuries. The day was hot, the view of the Palisades was spectacular. Christine sent us home with flowers from her garden.

Our tradition at the picnic is to talk about the book we're reading. The upside of the pandemic’s social distancing requirement may be that we have more time to read.  Following, a list of books read and recommended:

 

Connie:

Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

House: A Graphic Novel by Josh Simmons

 

Laura

The Visitation by Frank Peretti

March A Graphic Novel by John Lewis

 

Linda

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Rodham: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld

Trace Elements by Donna Leon

…and too many short stories to list

 

Laura

Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

Mysteries by Jane Langton, Patricia Cornwall and Deborah Crombie (particularly Crombie’s Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James series)

Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

 

Fran

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The Assistant by Robert Walser

The Provincial Lady Goes to America by E. M. Delafield

How Fiction Works by James Webb

 

Carol

mysteries by Donna Leon

Half the Way Home by Adam Hochschild

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

 

Joanna

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, audiobook read by Colin Farrell

My Favorite Things Are Monsters, A Graphic Novel by Emil Ferris

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Hastings Library’s webinar, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury led by Sharon DeLevie

 

Jacquie

An American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Rodham: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld

You Think It, I’ll Say It stories by Curtis Sittenfeld

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

How Much of the Hills Are Gold by C Pam Zhang

Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Apeirogon by Colin McCann

 

Lori

The Plague by Albert Camus

Nancy Mitford’s books (all)

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

 

Carla

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, PhD

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

 

Connie

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Girl Woman Other by Bernardine Evaristo

 

Christine

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

The Graduate by Charles Webb

Shirley Jackson’s short stories

A Children’s Bible: A Novel by Lydia Mollett

The Forty Days Of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel

Diana (who missed the meeting but let us know what she’s been reading)

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

The Overstory by Richard Powers

One Fine Day and Good Evening, Mrs. Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes

Quite a Year for Plums by Bailey White 

Our Lending Library

Carol had a great idea for getting new books while the Hastings Public Library is closed during coronavirus lockdown. Or even after the library re-opens. 

We know we can always buy a book, and hopefully not from an unnamed source because it has taken control of our buying. A political aside: the source's owner is insanely rich and doesn't pay his warehouse employees well nor give them benefits.

Even when we can find the rare independent book store, many of us don't want to buy yet one more book. The love we have for books has resulted in overstuffed bookshelves. Not a serious condition, but we must have limits to our indulgences.

We are forming our own lending library. Like good book sellers, we will recommend books to each other, ones that we have in our homes. If you want a book, get in touch with the member who's recommending it; you two will figure out time and place to get it. 

The library is in the form of a Google Document. Please add your recommendations.

We meet on Zoom

This is Jacquie's photo of our second Zoom meeting. 

Louisa had sent out an invitation for an informal gathering by Zoom in early May. At that time, we were still hoping that rules of social distancing would be lifted  and we could resume person-to-person meetings in mid-May. That likelihood was quickly disappearing.

The first Zoom meeting was a success - we loved being able to talk to each other again. We know Zoom is  a substitute for what we really want - to see each other in our full dimensionality -  but that's just not possible right now because of NY State coronavirus restrictions on social gatherings.

We have decided to proceed with Zoom. Connie led the way; she made her presentation on Mollie Panter-Downes on May 13, 2020. She had been circulating Panter-Downes' stories by email as her presentation got postponed from her original date of March 25 several times - all in the hopes that we could be together at hostess Christine's house. Panter-Downes' stories and "Letters from London" (in the New Yorker magazine) during World War II reminded us that there were worse times than a coronavirus lockdown. But the parallels were there - living through a time of fear, of restrictions, of shared experience. The comradery of being all in this together. The courage of Londoners during the first grim years of the war, when they alone were fighting the Axis powers, was inspiring. The good-will of Britain, accepting Jewish children through the Kinder Transport and the depressing refusal of the US to do the same, was a bitter reminder of the ways our government has failed. 

Why do we have this blog?

The blog started as a way to preserve our emails as we reacted and adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, we're using it as our archive, for minutes and email notices, starting in March 2020. We have continued many of our meetings on Zoom, and several, in person. We met outdoors when the weather permitted. After we were all vaccinated, and before the Omicron variant spiked in Hastings late December 2021, we met indoors, masked. We suspended our tradition of the meeting's hostess serving lunch. It's an inconvenience caused by the pandemic, we acknowledge it, but it's another of the small deprivations we've endured during this difficult time.