“One wearies of his ‘eternal triangle’ but in some respects his style is very wonderful. But he is obsessed by sex and cannot write about anything else. I wonder if he believed that there was one decent woman in the world.
Well, he died insane — so his point of view on life is not to be taken too seriously.”
“Well, he died insane — so his point of view on life is not to be taken too seriously.”
Whoa. I mean… Whoa.
This is the first quote that I had to come back to a few times to try and parse. Was this just a snarky dismissal of de Maupassant because of how she perceived his attitude was towards women? Or was a slap at something else, something just out of view? She pillories Byron’s character, perhaps rightfully so, but this goes deeper, and it is particularly unnerving in light of her own madness later in life. It just doesn’t seem to fit in, somehow, with the rest of Ms. Montgomery. It seems too careless.
I really can’t say. I don’t know.
She might have written that when she was a younger unmarried woman … I don’t have a date on it. In that case, she would have had no experience with madness at that point.
But honestly, I have no idea.
Oh, and about stuff “fitting in” … I couldn’t really sit down and say exactly what her tone is, or who she is.
Sometimes she is bleak without hope. Other times, I read her anecdotes and laugh out loud. Her descriptions of nature are superb. She can be a total and utter bitch. Also, she had a highly melodramatic sense of tragedy. She got into a car accident once, and literally – she couldn’t recover from the trauma for 2 months. Yet in other cases, as I sit and read her journals, I am in awe of her strength. And fortitude.
So I’m not sure … it’s an interesting thing to think about, though.
I certainly don’t know the lady like you do, red. I’m just learining about her as I go. That one just came out of the blue. On the other hand, I like deMaupassant, so maybe my reaction is defensive (and overblown).
I’ll keep reading.
I can speculate – but it’s just a guess. She was a very sexual (or sensual) person – who experienced passion with the young man she loved in her early 20s – but because of who she ended up marrying – she never had sex (or rarely – and if you have sex rarely, then it sure feels like never.) So she might have been a little hostile about that. She thought you had to be very very very careful about putting sex in books, and (to my taste) she was too picky.
Or it might have been just a throw-away comment in her journal, when she had 2 seconds free. I know I have a ton of those in my journal!!
However, I understand you leaping to the defense of a writer you love. She writes somewhere else (I think I posted it) that she loves Charlotte Bronte so much that she is angry whenever anyone slights her … I feel that way about Bronte, Joyce, “Catch-22”, a couple of others. :)
I’ve been thing about this passage all afternoon. It confounds me. It’s so off-hand, so casual, so coarse,compared to the other coments shown here, that I just can’t seem to hear her voice in it.
I wrote more, but it was so stupid, I killed it. Not only because I cannot know what was in her heart, but because I want to understand that which I cannot know.
Crap. I’ll drink to her and let it go.
Right.
Ha!!
Well, she could be quite quite unforgiving about human frailty. (Not in her books. Her books are filled with love and compassion) But in her real life, she was extremely unforgiving (occasionally) with someone who was weak. She hated weakness – because she had to be the strong one, for 65 years or whatever.
But it’s okay.
We’ll let it go. :)