Friday Five: Cross-Stitch on a Theme

Sometimes everything gets 'a bit much' and, in these times, I have found that working designs from Really Cross Stitch: For when You Just Want To Stab Something a Lot helps. Of course, I am not advocating violence, but I am hoping for progress, and there is a theme in my latest five patterns about who or what I would like to change. As previously, all the words are from Rayna Fahey, and all the complete lack of ironing is my own.

"Politicians and toddlers have a lot in common. They are both prone to tantrums and act unreasonably, especially when they don't get their own way. Every now and then - just like a toddler - you have to give them a good talking-to!"

"Contending for the misogynist comment of the millennium, a presidential candidate's suggestion that he was at liberty to grab female genitalia due to his privilege was dismissed as 'locker room talk'. Whilst this overheard vulgarity wasn't enough to kill an election campaign, it certainly put feminists on a war footing well before Trump took office.

This pattern attests to the fact that kitty has claws. The only pricks we will tolerate come from our cross stitch needle."

"Now it's really not nice to attack someone you don't like politically based on their appearance. But this time the temptation was too strong.

"For someone who is world-record-breakingly quick to insult someone, Trump's skin does appear to be diaphanously thin when it comes to people discussing the size of his hands. But in the scale of things, this is the guy that reinstated the Global Gag Rule and wants to ban the world's 1.6 billion Muslim people from America. So there's plenty of actual policy to organise around while you're doing this cross stitch."

"Cunts are deep, warm, and delightful; indeed the place from which the majority of us astoundingly enter this fragile world. Yet no single word creates as much division and carries as much power as this little number.

"One thing activists are super-good at is dissecting the meaning of language, until letters break down into pixels. Give us another decade and everyone will know that vagina is 16th century slang for a place to keep your sword. Ouch."

"Language can be used to persuade, amuse, insult, and mobilise action. Few formats can accomplish these goals as ably or succinctly as the protest sign.

"Of course, sometimes the words just won't come. Or there are too many of them to fit on one sign. Or you're just so tired of being angry and upset that you just want to go UGH; which is fine. 'Just, Ugh' conveys all the despair, rage and hopelessness in just seven easy letters, and of course, can be used for virtually any occasion as it works for anything. Plus, it's nice and easy to stitch."

Enough to bruise a heart

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

(Vintage) Pp. 226

Along with Revolutionary Road, this compact and expressive work is considered to be one of Richard Yates’ finest novels. His vision of all-American self-loathing and entrapment is bleak and painful to read, while his characters are well drawn with sharp outlines. The opening line sets the tone: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.” From there it is all steadily downhill and increasingly out of control.

The two sisters are Sarah and Emily: “Sarah was the dark one, with a look of trusting innocence that would never leave her; Emily, a head shorter, was blond and thin and very serious.” The novel is comprised of short descriptions without excessive detail; Yates tells stories and expresses thought and emotions succinctly. Over a span of forty years the girls grow up: their father leaves; they get careers and relationships and marriage and children; their mother, Pookie, goes into a home; and they try and live a life and be happy, but they aren’t.

Sarah marries an abusive man and succumbs to suburban depression; Emily has a succession of men; Pookie constantly tries to make up for being left by a man: they are all dominated by the need for male approval and validation, which chimes discordantly in this era. They seem to only validate their existence through male eyes. When Emily questions her older sister as to why she stays with a man who beats her, Sarah answers, “It’s a marriage. If you want to stay married, you learn to put up with things.” Emily suspects there may be alternatives and goes to college to major in English.

She moves to the city and takes on a series of not-very-important jobs in advertising, losing herself in unfulfilling relationships and drink. She begins to feel disillusioned as she ages. What options were there for women? Emily tells Sarah she could leave her husband and do something else, but what? “The only thing she could picture was Sarah working as a receptionist in some doctor’s or dentist’s office. (Where did all those pleasant, inefficient middle-aged ladies come from, and how had they gotten their jobs?)”

The relationships are all full of anger and spite, and the writing reflects this nasty misogyny. Emily’s husband, Andrew, tells her in intimate detail how much he hates her body (when they have been married for less than a year) in a degrading and objectifying manner, with no consideration of her mind. “I hate your sensitive little tits. I hate your ass and your hips, the way they move and turn; I hate your thighs, the way they open up. I hate your waist and your belly and your great hairy mound and your clitoris and your whole slippery cunt.”

These women are constantly trying to numb themselves from the sharp edges of the world in which they live. They turn inward, but they don’t like what they see there either, in what is a novel of profound sadness where the omnipresence of alcohol and ill health (both mental and physical) are reminiscent of Eugene O’Neill.

When the girls are young, Sarah dresses up to participate in the Easter Parade with her beau, and they are photographed in an image which will cause Emily lasting jealousy of their frozen-in-time happiness. But, whereas Easter usually signals new beginnings and hope, this is Richard Yates, so there is only stagnation and despair. This book may be small, but it is powerful, and the punch it packs is enough to bruise a heart.

Sell Our Souls

Faust by Robert Nye
Penguin Books
Pp. 277

We think we know the story of Faust. He sold his soul to the Devil in return for 24 years of corporeal pleasures. He’s demonised in literature from Goethe and Turgenev to Marlow and Mann, and is portrayed in myth and legend as a scholarly figure with a thirst for knowledge. In Robert Nye’s version, his thirst is much more carnal. He is a perverse, seedy has-been with a boil on his nose that he smears in grease, a filthy coat and an unbearable stench.

The novel is narrated by Christopher (Kit) Wagner, Faust’s sidekick. He decides to chronicle the story of Faust, so Faust is amused and may fabricate events for prosperity. Wagner doesn’t believe the tale of Mephistopheles and the pact with the Devil. There are, however, incidents that he cannot explain, such as the seven young women (ranging in age from 21 to 16) he has been given to pleasure him sexually. Their male-fantasy-succubi role ensures they are seen only as sex objects and the attitude towards them is misogynistic at best. The scatological novel is also full of references to other bodily functions. 

The book has very short chapters, as Wagner writes in a modern vernacular and assumes the reader is on his level. He tells us of his dislike for rhetoric and propounds his commoner credentials.

In a last-ditch attempt to renew his contract with the Devil, Faust sets off for Rome intending to kill the Pope with a poisoned communion wafer and thereby win favour with his satanic creditor. The grotesque cavalcade of the unholy pilgrimage includes Faust and his black dog, Satan, whom he claims to have stolen from Luther, Wagner and his harem, and a monkey in a cage, Ackercocke. A woman called Helen also accompanies them hoping that Faust will save his soul through repentance when he reaches the Holy City. Although she is not the traditional Helen of Troy, she does have visions of the Virgin Mary.

This is partly a picaresque novel following the traditional quest narrative as the troupe travel through the Alps with supernatural encounters. But it also has a point to make about the tyranny of religion. Wagner (previously a student of Divinity at the University of Wittenberg) is quick to denounce the perpetrators of doctrine and dogma. Early in the novel Faust remarks, “I’m not a fiend. I’m damned, that’s all.” He also argues that the Devil is the good guy who only wanted the restoration of his soul from God. “You call that pride? Well, I call it freedom.” Wagner applies his divination scholarship to this problem. “If you take Judas seriously, and Jesus, you end up with damnation and salvation being almost the same thing…” He seems to be counselling against living in fear of spiritual consequences.

There is deliberately nothing high-brow about this novel. Nye’s style is slangy and populist, where nothing is sacred, but while he degrades Calvin and Luther and debases the noble vision of the Faust legend, he doesn’t really replace it with anything but pornography and vulgarity.