I finished John Brewer’s A Sentimental Murder quite a while ago, but still want to write one last post on it (a previous post is here). It’s a wonderful book, in short. It tells the story of James Hackman’s murder of Martha Ray, mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, in 1779. But it does so much more than that — the first chapter tells what we know of the basic facts, and then subsequent chapters tell the story of how the story got told, how various versions developed, the “facts” changed, sympathies shifted.

There isn’t much we know of the facts, actually; Hackman had fallen in love with Martha Ray, but we don’t know for sure what her feelings were in return. On the night of the murder, he seemed more likely to commit suicide and leave Ray in safety, but something changed his mind, and he shot her just outside Covent Garden Theater. He tried to shoot himself, but failed.  He was tried for murder and hanged.

As the story gets shaped and retold through the end of the 18C and on into the 19C and 20C, the story focuses on different characters and different interpretations; at one point Hackman becomes a kind of sentimental hero — even though he is the murder — and at another, the focus is on Sandwich as an example of the corrupt aristocratic rake, and at another, on Martha, sometimes as an example of a fallen woman and sometimes as an exemplar of loyalty and devotion.

But the book does more than give varying interpretations of the story; it uses the story as a way to examine the culture surrounding it. Brewer includes a chapter on the 18C press, explaining how its openness and relatively amateur status meant that those in power could shape news stories as they saw fit (although those with competing versions of the story could do that too). He explains the late 18C culture of sensibility and how it fed into interpretations of the murder — this is a culture that valued emotional displays and loved to theorize about the political and social consequences of feeling. As he moves into the Victorian era, Brewer explains how writers took the murder as evidence of the decadence of late 18C life, compared, at least, to the moral uprightness of their own time.

One of my favorite parts of the book is the very end where Brewer backs up a bit to discuss theories of history and how his own story fits into them. He describes how, since the 1960s, the discipline of history has moved away from focusing solely on the public world of politics and economics and the big names — kings and presidents and prime ministers — and has moved toward telling the stories of everyday people. Writers of history also began to move away from using a detached and objective voice and wrote in a more subjective, personal, and engaged way. They began to look to new sources too — diaries and letters were sources of information, as well as the more traditional sources such as records of parliamentary debates.

Brewer explains how these changes in the discpline of history shaped his book:

The recent attempt to rethink the practice of historians, in other words, is a challenge not a threat. And it is in this spirit that I have written this book, partly as a certain kind of new history but also as an experiment, to see if it will work. I deliberately foreswore an approach that set out to recover the truth about events between 1775 and 1779, though I, as much as anyone, wonder about what lay behind the miasma of news, rumour, and information that circulated after Martha Ray’s death … I did not want to treat all subsequent accounts of the affair merely as sources of facts or evidence … I took what I considered a less invasive alternative. I tried to treat these accounts as stories or narratives with their own histories — not as databases of facts. The significance of each individual account — whether novel, anecdote, or essay — lay not in what it told us about James Hackman, Martha Ray, and the Earl of Sandwich, but in what it told us about the relationship between itself and the events of 1779, the connection between the past it was describing and its present.

If this book is an experiment in new forms of historical writing, I think it succeeds very well; he talks about history written from the bottom up, and this strikes me as a wonderful example — he gives us a picture of the late 18C century (and Victorian and 20C views of the late 18C) by focusing on one small story and following its development and implications. The story includes an aristocrat, but it’s a love story, not a political one — it’s a very personal story, and yet it tells us so much about the culture of the time. And the point is not so much what actually happened between Martha Ray and James Hackman — so much is unclear — but what the various versions of their story meant, what they reveal about the people telling the stories.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Litlove’s and Stefanie’s posts on Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer, and, if you haven’t read them yet, suggest that you go and read them first, and then return here.

I’ve now finished this book, and agree with Stefanie’s comment that the later chapters are better than the earlier ones. These later chapters cover things like character, dialogue, gesture, and detail, and perhaps these things are more complex and therefore more interesting than the topics of the earlier chapters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. At any rate, although my enjoyment of the book increased as I went on, I still have reservations about its quality.

To be fair, though, I’m not sure how I would have written such a book differently. Litlove confesses that she can be a quotation skipper at times, something I do as well, and much of this book is quotation (sometimes they go on for pages and pages). I got a little tired of quotation after quotation and felt that Prose’s analysis was sometimes a bit short and perfunctory. But how would one write this without the quotations? It’s good that the book was short or I would have found it tiresome; as it is, every time boredom threatened, I found I was near the end of a chapter and so contentedly moved on to another topic.

I’m also grateful the book was short (that sounds mean, although I don’t intend it to be) because what I found most valuable about it was the way it inspired me to pay more attention to the technical aspects of fiction, and that can be accomplished without reading something long. I loved Litlove’s point in her post that Prose is reading in a way that would make authors happy — she is pointing out their brilliance, calling attention to how they have carefully crafted their language — which is only one way of reading; another, perhaps deeper, way of reading is to read against the grain — to pay attention to the things an author may not have been so conscious of, to read subversively, as Litlove says. I’m trained to read in this latter way, and yet I’m intrigued by the former, by Prose’s attention to technical details. All this is to say that I’m grateful for Prose’s reminder of the pleasure to be found in enjoying a well-crafted sentence or bit of dialogue or a masterfully-chosen detail. Also I’m thinking about the technical aspects of writing more and more as I read my friend’s novel and talk with her about it and as I talk with Hobgoblin about his own writing process. All these things have added up to a fun glimpse into a writer’s life.

One more thing — my favorite chapter in Prose’s book is one near the end called “Learning from Chekhov”; here, Prose describes teaching a fiction writing class where her students notice the way she gives them advice about writing but then qualifies it and cites exceptions and backtracks, so much so that this turns into a class joke. She gives example after example of “rules” she has offered her students and then describes the almost eerie way she reads a Chekhov story after class that invariably breaks the rule. She tells a student that he needs to distinguish his two main characters more, and then reads a Chekhov story that has two main characters with the same name, for example, or she’ll tell a student to clarify a story’s point of view and then read a Chekhov story where the point of view similarly shifts.

I like this way of making a point that Prose has been developing throughout: that there really are no rules to fiction writing. It’s not that people sometimes break the rules; it’s that there are no rules. If I were a writer, I might find this idea a little bit terrifying (Prose’s students wanted some guidance, and I can understand why); as a reader, I find it completely freeing — I’m free to enjoy the infinite number of ways a story can be told.

I finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love a while ago, but I haven’t written about the last part yet. I suppose I won’t say a lot about it, so I can let those of you who are planning to read it discover it on your own. But I will say that while the middle section in India was my favorite, I liked the last section too; it’s set in Bali where Gilbert goes to try to find a balance between pleasure and prayer.

She visited Bali a few years earlier and met a medicine man who told her she would return, and that when she does, she should seek him out and study with him. She takes him at his word, and although she goes through a few scary moments when he doesn’t seem to recognize her, eventually she says the right thing to remind him of who she is, and he welcomes her and invites her to spend big chunks of her day with him. I very much admire Gilbert’s courage here — her ability to take risks, her willingness to tolerate not knowing exactly what she will do and who she will stay with and if the medicine man will remember who she is or even if he meant what he said or if he was just putting her on. Gilbert’s method of traveling is simply to show up somewhere and to see what happens. If I were a traveler, I might do it that way too — I’d get myself into all kinds of problems and have adventures, and I’d love it.

Anyway, there’s lots more stuff that goes on in this chapter — it’s got more action and is less philosophical than the India section. I did want to give you a few of the more meditative passages in the chapter, however; Gilbert reflects on happiness in one section, describing a lesson she has learned from a spiritual teacher:

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Now, I don’t know about you, but makes me feel exhausted. I kind of get what she’s saying — we can’t just expect happiness to fall into our laps, right? — but I shy away from any philosophy or form of spirituality requiring me to put in that much effort. Maybe I’m lazy, but I think it’s more likely that this is a hold-over from my younger days when I felt like I had to strive for perfection and could never, ever quite make it. I’m still exhausted from feeling that way. I used to think that I had to constantly guard my soul against sin, that I was in danger of messing up at any moment, that I needed to be forever vigilant against making a mistake. I’m not opposed to putting effort into a spiritual practice, not at all, but it’s got to come from an inner motivation, not from somebody else telling me what to do. And I tend to think that happiness actually does fall into our laps, that when we strive for it, it becomes elusive, and when we are focused on other things, it appears.

I liked this passage about happiness better:

I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once — that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-‘n’-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contement is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

I like that idea — that being happy means you are out of the way. You are less likely to trip other people up. I think this is a very freeing idea — wanting to be happy isn’t a selfish thing at all; finding happiness is a way of helping to make the people around you happy.