Reading post: Elizabeth Savage in May

May isn't quite over, but I'm mostly done with my planned reading (and we're about to go on vacation), so it's time for a reading post. In May I decided to read books by Elizabeth Savage, an American author who has been mostly forgotten. Born in 1918 (like my Uncle Bob), she's mainly known for having been married to the novelist Thomas Savage, who wrote The Power of the Dog (made into a movie a few years ago). She published nine novels from 1960 to 1980, but the only reason I know about her is that my oldest sister once gave me a copy of her fourth novel, Happy Ending (1972), and I loved it. I've read it several times since then, loving it every time.

But I had never read anything else by Savage except her first novel, Summer of Pride (1960) which I didn't like (I recall it as being a less good version of the story told in Happy Ending). About ten years ago, the librarian Nancy Pearl praised Savage's books and got two of them reprinted by Amazon. But you still can't find them in libraries. I ended up getting two of her books through Prospector, and I bought one used on Amazon.

• But Not For Love (1970). Savage's 2nd novel, published 10 years after her first. Oof. I did not like it at all. It's about a bunch of adult cousins, the Hollisters, who spend every summer on an island off the coast of Maine. Each of the four cousins owns a house or cottage on adjacent properties, all purchased originally by their grandparents or parents. Three are married and the fourth was previously married to another cousin, who may have drowned the year before. They hang out together, smoke and drink heavily, and annoy each other. They certainly annoyed me. Toward the end it occurred to me that perhaps the book was supposed to be funny. It isn't funny, but if that was the intent, that would explain some things. It was so interesting to me to compare this novel to Happy Ending. At what point did Savage learn that you need to make your characters appealing?
  
  
• The Last Night at the Ritz (1973). Savage's 5th novel. This was much better, although there was still the datedness problem. The book takes place around the time it was written, but the main characters were close friends in college in the early 1940s. Again, they drink like fish and smoke a lot -- I kept thinking, "their livers! their lungs!" -- but this book isn't primarily a comedy. The characters are dealing with serious stuff. They meet for drinks and lunch at the Ritz Hotel in Boston, and then they decide to meet for dinner too, and more drinks both before and after, and when the book finally ends it's the next morning and many things have been revealed. Everything reminds the main (unnamed) character of something that happened in their shared past, so you learn a lot about college life in the 1940s. I liked the book better as it went along, and by the end I was really worried about the characters and what would happen to them. And the ending kind of broke my heart.
  
  
• Toward the End (1980). Savage's 9th and last novel. So disappointing! We're back on an island in Maine, and as in But Not For Love, the characters are caricatures and the tone is ironic. This novel is maybe a tiny bit better than her 2nd, because we don't have to hear about the horrible Hollister family. But the characters we do have to hear about don't seem real and aren't sympathetic. The novel takes place over the course of about a year, a year when the inhabitants of four cottages on the coast of the island decide to "winter over" instead of going home to their real houses. Unfortunately, it is the year of the Great Blizzard of 1978, and some of the cottages are severely damaged. Honestly, I think Savage must have just wanted to write about that storm, which she lived through. She and her husband owned a house on an island off the coast of Maine and lived there for 30 years, until 1985. But this novel is so boring! I ended up reading it in two days because it was so dull that I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. The only good parts were the descriptions of the physical island and how it changed through the seasons. Sadly, this is the book I bought from Amazon, so now I own it. Haven't decided what to do with it yet.
   
  

So, what's the verdict on Elizabeth Savage? Mixed. Some of her books are great and some are awful. After reading these three I pulled out Happy Ending again to see whether I still loved it, but I did, very much so. In the first chapter, a character is described thusly:

Yes, she had been a nice child, though unamusing. But now... she reminded her mother (the black, the white, the lustrous hair, the beak) of a magpie.

How could I not love a book where a character is compared to a magpie, even though in a not very complimentary way? I think I will continue to explore Savage's books, at least some of them. I read a review of her 3rd novel, and it didn't sound very good, but I definitely want to try her 6th, 7th, and 8th novels, just in case they're wonderful.

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Since it was the second quarter of the year, I also read a biography of the next U.S. president on my list, #29, Warren G. Harding. In fact, I read two books about him, because the first one was so short: Warren G. Harding by John W. Dean, yes, that John W. Dean, part of the American Presidents series. Kind of an apology for Harding -- Dean likes him, thinks he was a much better president than most people do. In fact, thinking Harding wasn't so bad after all has become kind of a fad. The Teapot Dome scandal happened on his watch, but he didn't know about it, right? He had a 15-year affair with a neighbor, but we don't care about that nowadays, right? And then there was that woman who claimed to have had his baby, but she was lying, right? Dean is sure about that. Except, a few years ago they did DNA testing on her descendants and Harding's descendants, and it seems she was telling the truth. Oops.

Plus, that neighbor he had a 15-year affair with turns out to have been (possibly) a German spy during WWI. The second book I read, The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War by James David Robenalt, goes into that in great detail. It was very interesting. I found myself actually wanting to know more about Harding (and his women) and I'm considering reading either Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters or a biography of Harding's actual wife, Florence Harding (as opposed to all these mistresses). Or maybe both of them. I'll see how June goes.

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When I was at the main library to get a Harding biography, I walked past the poetry shelves and thought, oh, I'll get some poetry to read in May. But what? Nothing ever comes to mind when I'm faced with a thousand books on shelves. So I decided to find a poet whose last name was close to Savage and that brought me to May Sarton. Sarton was born in 1912, so she's roughly a contemporary of Savage, plus she lived in Maine for the last 22 years of her life (overlapping with Savage for about 12 years). I might consider reading Margot Peters' biography of her at some point. However, I didn't love her poetry. I liked it, some of it, but I got tired of it by the end of the book. All these excessively grand poems about her trips to Greece and India. I did like the poems about animals (a goose, a dog, a parrot, a snail), and one called "Nursery Rhyme"

...Under a crimson sun
In a pale milky sky
With a vermilion
Lizard near by,
And over it all
The strangeness that hovers
Like a green pall,
Envelopes and covers
In a warm still suspense
All of the landscape
Like a sixth sense--
Till there is no escape...

Supposedly Sarton wrote a lot of explicitly lesbian poems, but they seem to have been omitted from this collection, unless I missed something, lol.

In May, I was also supposed to read one book from the white bookcase in my bedroom, but there was almost nothing there I hadn't read before. So I grabbed another book from the piles by my bed and I plan to take it on our trip: All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. It's set in a fictionalized version of Ridgecrest!

As of today I've read 55 books and since my goal for the year was, as usual, 52 books, everything after this is gravy.

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In June I need another male author, and I have chosen Vladimir Nabokov because it embarrasses me that I've never really read him. The only thing I've read by him is Pnin, plus dipping into Lolita looking for the dirty parts when I was a teenager, which I don't think counts. I'm going to read Lolita cover to cover, plus a couple of others. Should be interesting.