Author Archives: The Reading Bug

Book review

The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis, 1969

Kingsley Amis spent his whole career not writing a successful follow up to his great first novel,  ‘Lucky Jim’. I loved ‘Lucky Jim’ when I first read it several decades ago, and while the passage of years has eroded that affection somewhat, at the time it lead me to read as much Amis as I could get my hands on. That’s not to say Amis’s later novels were bad – the Booker prize for ‘The Old Devils’, as well as a couple of other shortlisting, attests to that. ‘The Green Man’ stood out at the time as something very different from Amis’ s usual portraits, so when the opportunity to revisit it came up I took it, wondering whether it would be as good, and as strange, as I remembered it?the-green-man

I am glad to say it was. The Green Man of the title is an inn owned and managed, after a fashion, by Maurice Allington, a another thinly disguised Amis self-portrait. The inn dates back to the 14th century, and comes with the usual stories of hauntings and the occult. Strange things start to happen. Allington sees what we are lead to believe are ghosts, although the heroic scale of his alcoholism leaves open the distinct possibility that there are just hallucinations. His elderly father suffers a stroke, which if anything spurs Allington on to even greater peaks of drinking. Nothing seems to dent his self-destructive urges, and on the day of his father’s funeral he pursues an affair with his neighbour, and persuades her to have a ménage à trois with his wife. As with many novels written by middle aged men, his sexual allure is irrestistible, and this plan succeeds, to a point – the orgy happens, but he finds it hard to get involved, and eventually gives in and goes off and has another drink.

Refusing to believe they are simply hallucinations, Maurice somehow finds the time to investigate the hauntings. He uncovers the long lost diaries of Thomas Underhill, a local scholar and former owner of the inn, who he believes to be the identity of the ghost. These diaries reveal that Underhill used the supernatural to seduce and or ravish young girls from the village, and may be the explanation for the current events. The paranormal themes of the novel now take centre stage, as it becomes clear that the ghosts are not simply the product of Maurice’s drinking (even if he is unable persuade anyone else of their authenticity). Underhill emerges from the shadows and persuades Maurice to unearth his nearby grave, in which he finds an ancient silver figurine, which in turn leads to a rather clumsy scheme which will cause the death of Maurice’s teenage daughter. Maurice frustrates this plan at the last minute, in part due to an intervention by another supernatural figure who we are led to understand is a manifestation of God. If this sounds bizarre, it is, although Amis’s undoubted skills as a story teller allow him to carry it off.

The Green Man is traditionally portrayed as a benevolent figure, and Amis’ s idea to transform him into a sinister, lumbering killer is inspired. It is a mark of a confident writer that he can combine genres – the comedy of the drunken, lecherous innkeeper frozen out of his own orgy – with the supernatural Underhill narrative. Allington is ultimately a bit of a tragic albeit resilient figure, and as usual with Amis it is the underwritten women characters who one would like to have seen more of, rather than just playing bit parts as figures of sexual interest. Overall however I was pleased to find this novel still in print, despite Amis being very much an author no longer in vogue, and enjoyed the nostalgic re-read.

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Book review

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851

I now understand Moby Dick’s reputation for being unreadable. The core of the novel is the well-known whale-hunting adventure, with the obsessive Ahab pursuing the white whale to the ends of the farthest ocean, with the “from hell’s heart I stab at thee”, and all that.  This material would have made an excellent longer short story, a novella perhaps, with the excitement of the pursuit and the psychological portrait of the captain at its heart.zzmoby-dick

However, Melville chose to pad this story out to four or five times its length with an interminable, extraordinary amount of additional information about whales and whaling. It read very much as if he did a lot of background research to his subject and included it all in the novel. Can you imagine ‘Heart of Darkness’ with four hundred additional pages on the ivory trade? Or ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a detailed history of the prohibition movement? I found wading through the chapters on the different types of whale, how they are caught, processed, defined and anatomised really difficult, not least because of the brutality and callousness of the process, and the narrator’s wilful ignorance of the impact of nineteenth century whaling on the whale population.

If you can muscle your way past this issue, or perhaps find an expurgated version, there is plenty of interest elsewhere in the novel. Whaling was a dangerous occupation, and the thought of the small sailing boats setting off to harpoon mighty sperm whales has become an iconic image. I am sure I was not the only reader who at times was cheering on the whales. The opening chapters of the novel, when Ishmael meets Queequeg the cannibal harpooner, are very different in tone from those towards the end, and are surprisingly funny. Their relationship is openly homosexual and comically and euphemistically described. Ishmael advises the reader that it is ““Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” On their first night together sharing a bed, Ishmael catches sight of the “bald purplish head” of the “purple rascal,” and “shrieks” when Queequeg springs under the covers with his tomahawk. After some “kicking about”, Queequeg begins “feeling” Ishmael; next morning they awake with “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner…You had almost thought I had been his wife.” That Melville was able to get this past his publisher, and the reading public, probably says more about their racism towards the strange habits of the South Sea islander than it does their tolerance of alternative sexual lifestyles!

Ostensibly the narrator of the novel is Ishmael, but we are told very little of his back story, and even less about him as a character. Increasingly as time passes he fades into the background, to be replaced with a traditional omniscient narrator who can see multiple separate and simultaneous events, is able to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling, and is indistinguishable from Melville himself. Call me Ishmael if you like, but Herman would be more polite.

The climax of the novel, a reward for those who make it that far, is stunning. It shows what a good adventure novel has been struggling to emerge all that time. The white whale is sighted, pursued, harpooned, and – well for once I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice to say it was not the one I was expecting. I am conscious I am being quite philistine here – I really should be exploring the novel’s heavy symbolism, its complex literary allusions, and the multiple literary styles employed. Certainly that’s all there for the reader who wants to explore in more detail and read the text with more care – I was simply glad to make it to the other side. Incidentally, this novel ends the nineteenth century section of my read through of the Guardian’s top 100 novels written in English.

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Book review, Crime, His Bloody Project

His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet, 2015

zzhisbloodyprojectSubtitled Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae

(NB contains lots of spoilers)

The Guardian described this novel as “a slippery creature indeed”. Having read this and some other reviews, I was expecting a modernist novel, in which the unreliable narration leaves the reader to piece together their own version of what ‘really happened’. ‘His Bloody Project’ undoubtedly has some superficially modern features, most notably the use of apparently ‘found’ documents relating to the murders to construct the narrative. But don’t be either put off nor excited by this, because lurking behind this mildly unconventional façade is what I found to be in many ways a very traditional crime novel. Continue reading →

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Book review, Pure Juliet, Stella Gibbons

Pure Juliet, by Stella Gibbons, 2016

‘Pure Juliet’ tells the story of Juliet Slater, a working class girl from London, who just happens to be a mathematical genius. It is one of an increasingly popular genre, the lost novel. Originally written by Stella Gibbons in the 1970’s, it was not published in her lifetime (she died in 1989) but was recently “discovered” by her family and has been marketed by the publishers with this narrative, rather than “the author didn’t think this was quite good enough yet but never got round to revising it” which is probably closer to the truth.pure-juliet

Cultural references set the first section of the novel, in which Juliet completes her A levels and leaves home to stay with an adoptive aunt, Miss Pennecuick, in her isolated country house in rural Hertfordshire, in the late 1970’s – punk rock, Friends of the Earth, and Star Wars are mentioned. Continue reading →

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Book review

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957

“What’ll we do? What’ll we do? Let’s move”.

“I just won’t sleep,” I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”

If you had to summarise this novel in two quotes, there you are!on-the-road

‘On the Road’ tells the breathless story of the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, “two broken down heroes of the Western night”. Set in the years immediately after the Second World War, Sal and Dean, young men of no known occupation or visible means of support, criss-cross America restlessly by car, train and plane:

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’

‘Where we going, man?’

‘I don’t know but we gotta go.” Continue reading →

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American literature, Book review, science fiction'

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, 1953

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

Bradbury’s seminal dystopian novel is one of the key texts of the McCarthyite era in post-war America. Bradbury describes a world in many ways very much like his own, but where firemen burn books, where the population are distracted from an understanding of their lack of freedom and the threat of nuclear war by the bread and circuses of wall-sized flat screen televisions, and in-ear “sea-shell thimbles”, and where suspects are hunted down by helicopter and summarily executed on live television. Continue reading →

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Book review

Supplementary: Clothing in ‘Vanity Fair’

Generally, Thackeray does not use clothing to illustrate character to any great extent in ‘Vanity Fair’. He will often tell us someone is wearing ‘smart’ or ‘worn’ or ‘faded’ clothes, without providing any further detail. But I noticed a couple of exceptions to this approach that caught my attention, one example relating to Amelia Sedley, and the other to her alter-ego, Becky Sharp. (Incidentally, it is interesting to me that Sharp is the name Becky is popularly known by, despite the fact that for most of the novel she is Becky Crawley – Sharp is obviously a much closer fit to her character, even though she can be obsequious with the best of them at times!)

The first example occurs when Amelia is getting married. Thackeray describes her thus:“The bride was dressed in a brown silk pelisse…and wore a straw bonnet with a pink ribbon; over the bonnet she had a veil of white Chantilly lace” pelisse

I had not come across the term pelisse before, but the internet tells me that “in early 19th-century Europe, (Vanity Fair is set in 1815 and the following decades) when military clothing was often used as inspiration for fashionable ladies’ garments, the term pelisse was applied to a woman’s long, fitted coat with set-in sleeves and the then-fashionable Empire waist. Although initially these Regency-era pelisses copied the Hussars’ fur and braid, they soon lost these initial associations, and in fact were often made entirely of silk and without fur at all. They did, however, tend to retain traces of their military inspiration with frog fastenings and braid trim.

Amelia is wearing – as her wedding dress – a brown silk coat of a military design. In the picture I have used here it looks a lot more feminine than it sounds; from the description alone you might think she was heading out on manoeuvres, rather than going to a wedding. The context of course is crucial – this wedding is being held in secret, in the face of opposition from the groom’s father, shortly before the groom and his best man (Major Dobbin) head off to face the French at Waterloo. It is, in other words, a military wedding, in which the participants must have many mixed feelings other than the pure joy normally associated with these occasions. A dark, uniform based costume seems in the circumstances more appropriate than a traditional wedding dress.

The accompanying “straw bonnet with a pink ribbon” and “veil of white Chantilly lace” are arguably more traditional items. The Wikipedia entry on Chantilly lace is, as entries on lace go, fascinating. It originated in Chantilly (duh), near Paris. Amelia is wearing French lace, even though her husband is about to go off and fight the French. This might be seen as being insensitive, but is consistent with the rest of the novel, in which there is not a trace of animosity amongst the adults against the French themselves – for example Becky has a French mother and teaches French – this is not a cause for comment or censure in the slightest. The fact that her mother was a dancer is on the other hand utterly scandalous. After Waterloo Paris resumes its place in the Grand Tour as if the war had never taken place. I think what is happening here is that the conflict was seen – on the northern side of the Channel at least – as not being Britain versus France, but Britain versus Napoleon, and the forces of revolution he represented.

Chantilly laces, Wikipedia goes on to tell us, were “generally black, which made them suitable for mourning wear. Little white Chantilly was ever made.” In wearing a lace more traditionally worn as mourning, the novel is foreshadowing the widow’s weeds that Amelia is to wear for so long after George dies at Waterloo. But there is more – in the gift that keeps on giving, Wikipedia also tells us that Chantilly “was a special favourite of…Marie Antoinette. When the French Revolution began…the lace-makers were seen as protégés of the royals, and after Mme du Barry and Marie Antoinette were guillotined in 1793, the lace-makers of Chantilly were themselves killed. Napoleon I sponsored revivals of Chantilly lace, most especially between the years 1804 and 1815.” This is a garment very specifically associated with the French aristocracy, revolution, and Napoleon. Not very diplomatic of Amelia, was it? Thackeray dresses Amelia with particular care in this scene, even if modern readers need to have recourse to the internet to decode it!

The second example I wanted to pick out occurs when Jos visits Becky in her down-at-heels apartment in Paris in chapter 65:

“She had, by way of morning robe, a pink domino, a trifle faded and soiled, and marked here and there with pomaturn; but her arms shone out from the loose sleeves of the dress very white and fair, and it was tied round her little waist so as to not ill set off the trim little figure of the wearer.”

I took me some time to track down precisely what a domino was in this context. All the references online were to a domino being worn at a masquerade, or more simply as a form of fancy dress, often with a mask. One website explains:

“All the participants at a masquerade had to be masked and in disguise. Perhaps the most frequent sight at a masquerade was the “domino” costume. Venetian in origin, this disguise was very simple; it was comprised of a dark loose cloak that enveloped the body accompanied by a mask. These costumes were usually black, but occasionally varied to white and blue. The domino costume represented intrigue, adventure, conspiracy and mystery, four elements that were a distinct part of the masquerade atmosphere. The Domino costume was also often worn by both sexes.”

Intrigue, adventure, conspiracy and mystery – Becky’s favourite qualities. If ever there was a costume that fitted her personality it is one which represents these elements. The robe is one of the many costumes that Becky wears in the course of the novel – she is always performing, putting on an act, sometimes literally acting out a scene to impersonate and mock someone to others. The true Becky is rarely revealed – we get glimpses of her internal narration, but for most of the novel  she is playing a role, be it the injured wife, the love struck young woman, the bereft mother, and so on, always with an eye on the main chance. It is therefore hugely appropriate that she should wear – as casual morning wear – a performer’s costume, part of a disguise. The robe is faded and soiled and marked with hair oil – pomaturn (whose, I wonder? – I don’t think Becky wears hair oil) but despite this the narrator, seeing her largely through the eyes of Jos Sedley I think, cannot avoid noticing her attractive, petite arms and waist, and her trim little figure. By this stage in the novel there is little disguising the fact that Becky is a fallen woman – the scene later in this chapter were she hides her dinner and bottle of spirits under the bed-clothes to hide them from Jos, then has to try to avoid sitting on them, is comic but also a bit pathetic – and wears the worn, soiled costume of a performer fallen on hard times, which for once is exactly what she is.

What do you think – am I reading too much into these descriptions of Amelia and Becky, or is Thackeray a deceptively skillful author who can tell us a lot about a character using apparently incidental detail?

 

 

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 19th Century literature, Book review

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848

vanity-fair“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.”

Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ draws its name from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. It was published in nineteen monthly instalments, and as with many Victorian novels shows some evidence of padding – the scenes in continental Europe at the end of the novel in particular were quite obvious word-count filling.

Thackeray uses a distancing technique to allow him to present the story as a fair-ground puppet show. This allows him to present what would on some circumstances be seen as shocking or unrealistic behaviour – “it’s only a story” – but for almost all the novel the central characters are very real and present, and treated by the narrator as being genuine characters rather than archetypes. Continue reading →

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21st century literature, adventure story, Book review

Where my heart used to beat, by Sebastian Faulks, 2015

It wasn’t until I noticed this novel lurking in the Times’s ‘ten best-sellers in paperback’ list last week that I remembered I had read it. Such is the depth of impression it made, and I had to quickly remind myself what it was about – I had a vague memory of the war being involved – by reading some online reviews. They were not overly kind – the New York Times called it “biscuit bland” (a wonderful phrase which I will surely steal); the Washington Post an “an unmeshed assemblage of case histories”; the Irish Times a rather tedious piece of retro-sexism; the Guardian “dithery” (although the quote from this review which the publisher chooses to focus on is “combining as it does the cultural narrative of a complex century forsaken by God and certainty, a serious investigation into the vulnerability of the human mind and an old-fashioned – in the best sense – story of love and war, this is an ambitious, demanding and profoundly melancholy book”. I think “dithery” is more concise!)

Briefly, Robert Hendricks, doctor who specialises in psychiatry, aged 60ish, lives alone and clearly has had problems forming long term relationships. Out of the blue he is contacted by a stranger who knew his father in the First World War and is looking for a literary executor. Intrigued Robert travels to a small mysterious island, and begins a series of reminiscences which slowly unfold the story of his life. The text is unnecessarily complex, with tales within tales. The mysterious island turns out not to be mysterious at all, just small (large enough to have a town, and a mayor, but not large enough to appear on maps). Hendricks is an unengaging character, in his mid-sixties and seemingly irresistible to women. What is it about novels by men of a certain age where women keep throwing themselves at the central male character, stripping off at the drop of a hat and offering him no-strings sex – even the prostitute he engages in the first chapter can’t resist him, and despite his reluctance she is “intent on a repeat”. Such a nuisance when there are some more war diaries to be read.

The reviewers are universally agreed that this novel really takes flight when the inevitable sections on the second world war arrive. I can’t disagree – the portrait of the attempted break out at Anzio is well-written, but there is nothing particularly new here, and the scenes of squalor and fear fit uneasily in the romantic and literary mystery that comprises the rest of the novel, a mystery that I found dull, clumsily plotted and episodic.

“Throughout my life,” Hendricks tells us at one point, “I had thought that if I could get through this section of it, then the pattern of a destiny would reveal itself.” I know how he feels. Was this quote an example of Faulks going all-post-modern on us, anticipating the inevitable criticism of this meandering novel, or just a happy coincidence?

Just as a post-script, I did find one point of interest in the novel. It is set in the early 1980’s.Hendricks is 60ish, which means he was old enough to have fought in the second world war. It was only at that moment that I belatedly realised out that the older adults around me when I was growing up in the 70’s were of the right age to have fought in that war – and that now so many of them are gone. It is an arresting thought that 1980 was nearer in time to the end of the second world war than it is to today. Faulks chose this point in time carefully, and well.

 

 

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100 Best Novels Guardian list, 20th century Literature, American literature, Book review

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, 1922

‘Babbitt’, Sinclair Lewis’s satirical portrait of 1920’s America, was written only three years into the prohibition era, and published three years before that other, very different portrait of the USA of the time, ‘The Great Gatsby’. babbittThe term ‘babbitt’ was used in the US for some time (I am not sure if it is still current) to signify a person, especially a business or professional man, who “conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards and norms”. The name itself is a cleverly constructed combination of ‘babble’, the meaningless babyish talk that Babbitt typically uses when in discussion with his friends, and ‘rabbit’, a small and vulnerable creature, the opposite of the alpha-male that he believes himself to be.

‘Babbitt’ tells the story of two years in the life of estate agent George Babbitt. The novel opens in 1920 when George is 46. He is an unthinking lower middle class businessman, married with three children, staunchly conservative in his views, and profoundly hypocritical in his behaviour. In conventional terms not much happens – he has doubts about some of his convictions, as his children grow up and begin to drift away from him, but after a brief flirtation with a more decadent and liberal group of friends he rapidly scuttles back to his safety zone, unharmed and none the wiser. His story is told by a third person narrator who largely reflects Babbitt’s thoughts and feelings, although the narrative voice occasionally steps apart from Babbitt to give the reader an alternative perspective. This different point of view is usually not really needed, because the narrator does such a good job of pointing out the contradictions inherent in Babbitt’s prejudices.

“All of them agreed that the working-classes must be kept in their place; and all of them perceived that American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.”

Hypocrites they may be, but some of Babbitt’s associates realise and accept that their respectable façade is dishonest. Early in the novel Jake Offutt, a politician and Henry T. Thompson, Babbitt’s father-in-law confer:

“Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank? We’re safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots. There’s swell pickings for an honest politician here Hank: a whole city working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation, whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along. Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn’t milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it!”

As a satire on American post-war life, its small-mindedness and emptiness, its lack of genuine spirituality, its hypocrisy and prejudice, ‘Babbitt’ is effective, but perhaps a little heavy-handed. With some important exceptions, the principal characters of the novel, Babbitt’s friends and business acquaintances, are all varying reflections of Babbitt himself –stupid and prejudiced, despite considering themselves cultured and modern: There is a deeply unpleasant and sinister tone to some of their comments, such as this discussion in chapter 10:

“We ought to get together and show the black man, yes, and the yellow man, his place. Now I haven’t got one particle of race prejudice, I’m the first to be glad when a n***** succeeds, so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn’t try to usurp the rightful authority of the white man….And another thing we got to do is keep these damn foreigners out of the country. These Dagoes and Hunkies have got to learn that this is a white man’s country”

So perhaps some things haven’t changed that much?

Personally, while I enjoyed the mild sarcasm that Lewis deploys, I found the portrait of a classic mid-life crisis more interesting. When his friend Paul Riesling shoots his wife, this precipitates a moment where Babbitt comes to question the value and purpose of his life. He is unable to pinpoint the source of his dissatisfaction. There is a suggestion in the novel that Babbitt’s dissatisfaction with life derives from his unrecognised doubts about his sexuality. The first hints of this come when he is thinking about the film stars he has seen in his teenage daughter’s magazines, describing them as

‘blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful young men”.

We are told that he married without being in love with his wife, and that his sex life is very limited:

“She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was loyal, industrious, and at rare times merry. She passed from a feeble disgust at their closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it drooped into a bored routine.” (Chapter 6)

(By closer relations I don’t think Lewis means aunts and uncles). ‘Feeble disgust’ is a sad comment on their marital sex-life, and the choice of the verb “drooped” can’t be an accident! Later in their marriage, after his wife returns from an extended break with her sister out of State, Babbitt shrinks from the prospect of having reunion sex. Lewis coyly puts it thus:

“All the while he was dreading the moment when he would be alone with his wife, and she would patiently expect him to be ardent”. (Chapter 25)

Lack of interest in sex with his wife might be a symptom of Babbitt’s developing mid life crisis, but equally Lewis hints at a more specific cause:

“What did he want? Wealth? Social position? Travel? Servants? Yes, but only incidentally…But he did know that he wanted the presence of Paul Riesling, and from that he stumbled into the admission that he wanted the fairy girl in the flesh. If there had been a woman whom he loved he would have fled to her.” (Chapter 23)

In the US at this time the term fairy was used to describe a gay man. [1] Is this Babbitt’s unconscious speaking to him through his dreams, telling him to pursue his true nature? There is another hint of this in his earliest description of the fairy girl “She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant”. Indeed.

Wondering with this was a genuinely original insight, or whether this was a conventional modern reading of the novel, I asked Google. There is a paper from Richard Schwartz of the Department of English, Florida International University here which argues persuasively that ‘Babbitt’ is a portrait of latent homosexuality. I am not going to repeat the comprehensive arguments and evidence that Schwartz has put together, but if you are reluctant to click through to his paper consider these points that he has assembled:

“Babbitt “was an older brother to Paul Riesling, swift to defend him, admiring him with a proud and credulous love passing the love of women.” In Paul’s presence Babbitt “was awkward, he desired to be quiet and firm and deft.” At their club they eat apart from his regular group of dining companions, even though “At the Zenith Athletic Club, privacy was very bad form. But he wanted Paul to himself.” ”

There’s lots more. Incidentally, the phrase ‘love passing the love of women’ echoes that emphatic Victoria phrase, the “love that dare not speak its name” and is a quote from 2 Samuel 1.26 David’s Song for Saul and Jonathan in the New American Standard Bible.

When you read the novel from this perspective, Babbitt’s behaviour and his unresolved agonies about his life begin to make a lot more sense.

Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1930, and ‘Babbitt’ was cited by the committee as being one of his main achievements. Time hasn’t been kind to this novel – there are better, funnier portraits of the period and type.

[1] <1895 “the peculiar society of inverts. Coffee-clatches, where the members dress themselves with aprons etc., and knit, gossip and crotchet; balls, where men adopt the ladies’ evening dress, are well known in Europe. ‘The Fairies’ of New York are said to be a similar secret organization. The avocation which inverts follow are frequently feminine in their nature. They are fond of the actor’s life, and particularly that of the comedian requiring the dressing in female attire, and the singing in imitation of a female voice, in which they often excel.”—‘American Journal of Psychology,’ VII. page 216

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