Backlisted - American Books Special

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Welcome to the fourth Backlisted Special. While Andy and Nicky are both ‘gathering’ for the new season which will resume at the end of the month, John and Tess are joined by the writers and critics Erica Wagner and Sarah Churchwell who boast a total of 12 previous appearances between them, covering books from Alan Garner and Nella Larsen to Thomas Pynchon and Anita Loos. The format of these specials differs from the main show in that they feature guests choosing a number of books in an area they know and care about. For this hour-long special, Erica and Sarah have selected six pieces of modern American literature that they either love, or find interesting, or both. As you will discover, despite the eclectic nature of their choices, some surprising connections begin to emerge… Rough Timings (may vary due to adverts): 06'32: Free to be You and Me – Marlo Thomas and Friends  15'30:‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ –  F.Scott Fitzgerald 24'12: The Magician's Assistant – Ann Patchett  33'20: Charlotte Temple – Susanna Rowson 41'22: A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L'Engle  49'03: Little Women – Louisa May Alcott * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I was born warmed up. I'm in the Drome Valley, about an hour and a half northwest of Avenue. It is very beautiful here. It's cold, but very beautiful. And I know where you are, Erica. We know where we are. Next door. Exactly. And we were just, John and I were just explaining to our waiter when we had lunch that the podcast was not called Blacklisted,

which is a different podcast, obviously. But yes, I am ready to go. Great. Well, listen, I, this is, can I just say this is the maddest collection of books? I know, we were just saying that. Just insane. So. We need to stipulate that these are not our professionally established best books of all time. This is our random eclectic group of things we thought would be fun to talk about. Part of the thing is we didn't want to talk about books that we felt might go on to make full backlisted in due course.

Although we're going to get some Little Women hate on that. People will say, what do you mean? Little Women can't be a full episode. Yeah. Of course it can. Yeah. Well, I mean. We can talk about that.

We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that when we come to it. Talk about all of it. Okay. So, I mean, broadly, you know know kind of we've got six books so sort of five to seven minutes is on the on each one i mean we'll i'll try and move us through we'll probably do more than an hour but we should try and not do too much more than an hour i can't do much i love it i love a deadline okay it's now because i was they were going to pick me up at 5 30 so i've just messaged

them that we're late but i I can't go past 6. Right, well, let's do it. Let's start. Hello and welcome to our fourth Backlisted Special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And while Andy and Nikki are both gathering for the new season, which will resume at the end of the month, I am pleased today to welcome back two regular guests who, between them, boast no fewer than 12 previous appearances, Erica Wagner and Sarah Churchwell. Erica, Sarah, welcome. Thanks. So good to be here. Erica has joined us

previously to talk about the work of Alan Garner twice, Randall Jarrell, Dennis Johnson, and Tony White and Pete Dexter. She was the literary editor of the London Times for 17 years and is now a contributing writer for the New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper's Bazaar and on the board of Created Inc. Maybe tell us a bit more about that later. She has published two novels, a collection of stories, a biography of the Brooklyn Bridge engineer Washington Roeblingbling and her latest book mary and mr elliott about mary trevelyan's friendship with t.s elliott published by faber and faber last year and described by william boyd as a completely fascinating revelatory exposure of a forgotten

corner of t.s elliott's amateur life a classic of its kind and i was very happy to go to the launch of that party but it's um we were we were talking about uh we were talking about Eliot and the in the strange world of now of literary biography finding different ways to tell to tell stories at lunchtime Sarah Churchwell Sarah has been a guest on the episodes where we discussed Nella Larson, Nita Luce, Gail Jones, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, and she made a famous cameo appearance on our Proustmas special, which is now something like five, maybe even six years ago. She is Professor in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities

at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, the author of books on Marilyn Monroe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, A History of America First and the American Dream. Her latest book, The Wrath to Come, Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells, was published last year by Head of Zeus and comes out in paperback. Is it this Thursday? It is. It's this Thursday, 13th of April. Amazing. Described by historian Peter Frankopan as eye-opening and at times jaw-dropping. Yes, nice metaphors there. And what we're here to do today is, as you know, these specials are rather different

in that they feature guests choosing a number of books in an area they care about. So today, Erica and Sarah have selected six pieces, I'm calling them pieces, of modern American literature that they either love or find interesting or both. These aren't necessarily the books they think are the greatest works of American literature, nor are they necessarily books that we would expect to find on anyone's lists of essential American books. But what they are is kind of eclectic. of essential American books. But what they are is kind of eclectic.

We try with these specials to not use up books that we know that we could probably get a great episode out of. Although sometimes, as happened with Ursula Le Guin, with Una's brilliant kind of account of the dispossessed, you think, yeah, well, maybe we should. So we'll see. Who knows? At the end of this eclectic hour of literary discussion, we'll see if any of the books that we talk about present themselves as contenders for a full episode. I'm going to keep saying the word eclectic and you'll understand why. Anyway, let's crack on. Welcome to the Backlisted American Books Special.

And first up, Erica, it's not really a book at all, is it? Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Friends. It's not really a book at all, but I decided to get it in anyway because I'm cheeky that way. And perhaps because Free to Be You and Me helped teach me that I should just do what I wanted in life. Originally, it was an album made by, as you said, Marlo Thomas and friends, released, I think, in 1972. Alda, Rosie Greer, Cicely Tyson, Michael Jackson, Roberta Flack, Diana Ross, a really incredible roster of people. And it's a collection of songs and stories that was produced also kind of in association with Ms. Magazine, which had been founded not long before, that was dedicated to the idea to raising, let's call them gender neutral kids. And it was hugely influential for me when I was a kid.

And shall I give a little flavor of it? Should we start right in? Yeah. My dog is a plumber. He must be a boy. Although I must tell you, his favorite toy is a little play stove with pans and with pots, which he really must like because he plays with it lots. So perhaps he's a girl, which kind of makes sense,

since he can't throw a ball and he can't climb a fence, but neither can dad, and I know he's a man, and mom is a woman and she drives a van. Maybe the problem is in trying to tell just what someone is by what she does well. someone is by what she does well. And that little poem is spoken on the album, and I do believe written by, of all people, Dick Cavett, the wonderful talk show host, Dick Cavett. And this is what Free to Be You and Me is. It's a collection of songs and stories that allow us to be what we wanted. And it's been very influential to a certain generation, she raises her hand, of American kids who have then gone on to gift it to people pretty much anytime anyone has a baby. I give them a copy of Free to Be You and Me, whatever flavor the baby. And they did a live kind of review, didn't they, as well, that was, I know, hugely popular in 74,

which I know gets kind of replayed. Sarah, were you aware of this as a thing? I was really aware of it as a thing. But this is very, very, very, not just generationally specific, but intergenerationally specific, because I'm just that little bit younger than Erica, and so I was aware of it, but it wasn't formative for me, and so we knew it, but it was kind of something that older kids had listened to, and then I didn't listen to, and I never, so I could, as soon as I heard the theme song I would have, I'm sure, a kind of Proustian moment, but I never really listened

to it. I didn't know the poems. I was certainly not aware that Dick Cavett, of all people, contributed to it, which has just slightly blown my mind. But, and also those rhythms were very Dr. Seuss-y that you were just reading, Erica, which is funny. So it was certainly ambient. One was aware of it, but it was not, I never listened to the whole album. I never, or, you know, I certainly never read the book. I didn't watch the TV show. Well, if I watched it in 74, I was too young to remember. So my mother may have parked me in front of it, but I'm not sure it had any influence on me. And I mean, for me me they felt there was a slight kind of um sesame street vibe and i know that bruce hart and carol hart the kind of uh two of the songwriters who were behind sort of sesame street were kind of writers for the show it's interesting isn't it whether this stuff is

transferable i i can't think of anything that's quite as it's a bit like shel silverstein that comes up where it's it's to be honest it's not a million miles away, Erica, from the conversation we had about The Animal Family and Randall Jarrell, which is an American classic, which really has no profile at all in the UK. I think there's a more general discussion about the way in which books that are published for children tend to have less of a transatlantic reach for whatever reason, maybe because children aren't in a position to read about things. They tend to stay kind of site specific. So I've always been aware that there's stuff that I grew up with,

like this, that now that I live in Britain, my fellow Britons don't know. And similarly, people like Judith Carr, who I only discovered, or indeed, Alan Garner, discovered as an adult, because they just weren't present for me when I was a kid. I also think that there's a lot of children's literature is quite culturally specific because it's specifically educational and because therefore it's responding to particular educational needs that are identified in that moment by that culture, by parents, by publishers, by editors, by writers. And they think this is, and it's very responsive and reactive in that sense, especially stuff for small children, because by definition, in five years, they're not small children anymore. So it's very fluid, I think, in that way. And so there are things that, you know, even things like you think about the ways in which you might want

to indirectly teach local history or national history, and you do it through these, you know, beloved stories, or you might want to be actually adapting, you know, an older British tradition and making it specifically American for American kids, or, you know, thinking about the differences in spelling or things like that, that you maybe, not even necessarily in an isolationist or xenophobic way, but that you don't want to confuse your kids by giving them British things.

You actually want them to have, you know, get the American spellings first, or, you know, that kind of thing. So there are many different ways in which in a benign way, you can imagine people being kind of consciously saying, or more or less consciously, deliberately thinking, I want something that's quite culturally specific here for this formative moment. And then I want my kids to range more widely, perhaps. I mean, I think that that may have been an attitude, at least when we were growing up. I think it's probably less so today. And what I would just add is you mentioned John Carroll Hart, who was a producer for the inaugural season of Sesame Street, and which has a very American feeling to it, too, of course, although it's beloved around the world. I would

say that Free to Be You and Me, what it has in common with Sesame Street is the ability to speak to multiple ages at once. You know, I enjoyed this when I was really quite a little kid, but there are subtle layers and funny things about it that I now appreciate as an adult. And I feel the same way about Sesame Street. So it's not only, it's very clever because it's not just speaking to its young audience, but speaking to a broader audience too. It's communicating a kind of an important message in obviously a really, you know, this is not being shoved down kids' throats. It's just, it's fun.

The poem you read is wonderful. It reminded me of that great line from Schitt's Creek, that the, what is his, what is the son's name? David. David. I know the line you're going to do. You do. It's about wine bottles. He says, I'm not really interested in the labels. I'm interested in the wine. And I love there's a great the kind of, you know, Robert Criscow, the Rolling Stone writer said, I've been giving this high minded feminist kiddie record to various young Americans on the theory it's not necessary or easy to like the New York dolls at age five.

I figured it would be good for them like baths. Surprise number one is that they all love it to a person. Surprise number two, that I myself would much rather listen to Carol Channing on housework than to Robert Klein on dope. Anyway, I'm totally going to listen to this. It was completely new to me. And that's exactly what these specials are about. So thank you. And we will be talking about, I think some of the themes that this raises about gender and certainly about feminism and feminist consciousness will be definitely reprised later in the show. But Sarah, what's first on your slate today? I think, I'm going to make sure I got the sequence right,

but I think the first one that we're going to talk about is by a much better known writer, but maybe one of his less well-known texts. You said pieces at the beginning because it is not in fact a novel, but is the short story, The Diamond As Big As The Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I'm smuggling him in, in a sense, because John has been promising me since Backlisted began, literally since you said

to me, I'm doing, I've got this thing, do you want to come on to it? And I did Nella Larson in an early episode. And I keep saying, when am I going to get to do Fitzgerald? And at first, you're all, well, you know, we're doing books that people haven't really heard of. So that's the Great Gatsby doesn't qualify. And then we talked a little bit about maybe doing Tender is the Night as one of Fitzgerald's lesser, obviously, masterpiece, but as the kind of other masterpiece. So I'm just I'm putting this now so that it's on the record for listeners so that they can, you know, please send in on postcards your demands that we do a Fitzgerald episode properly. But in lieu of that, I'm bringing in some fits. And I love this story, Diamond as Big as the Ritz. And what a piece, what a piece of writing.

It's just fantastic. And Jose, a couple of, I mean, it is, it's not unknown, right? And for people who know Fitzgerald's short fiction, they may well have run across it. It's anthologized. It's around. It's, you know, he has neglected short stories that I guarantee you've never heard of. And you have to be a Fitzgerald scholar to know about. Diamond as Big as the Ritz is still pretty prominent. People are aware of it.

But it's not as well known as I think it deserves to be. But also for me, it captures a couple of key things about Fitzgerald that aren't part of our kind of cultural caricature of him and our kind of cultural image, our memory of him. So first of all, it's funny, and people don't think of Fitzgerald as a funny writer, but in my mind he is. And what this story does is it captures a moment in Fitzgerald's career. It was published in early 1922, which of course is the year in which he sets The Great Gatsby, which was published. In fact, we're speaking just after the anniversary of Gatsby's publication, which was on April 10th, 1925. So we're at the 98th anniversary of Gatsby plus, I think, one day as we record. So 1922 is kind of important year, both in the

kind of mythology of Gatsby, but also in Fitzgerald's own career. And it was a turning point in various ways. But one of the things that he, that again, a lot of people don't realize was that he started out as a satirist. And he really saw himself as a satirist in a kind of Thackerayian mode and very much in an H.L. Mencken mode, who was one of his great early influences. And that satire survives in Gatsby, but often people, I think, just read right over it. Like, they just don't really register it. And it's a lot stronger in The Diamonds as Big as the Ritz, but still people can miss it. So I think that one of the key things about this story is it's a satire of American capitalism written in 1922 that is incredibly

ahead of its time. And one of the jokes in it, and it is a joke, and it may sound like it's a joke in bad taste, but in context, it's actually not. It's an anti-racist joke that Fitzgerald makes in 1922, which is about the fact that American capitalism was built on slavery. And he recognizes that very, very clearly. And there's a joke at the expense of monopoly capitalists,

the owner of the eponymous mountain that is a diamond as big as the Ritz, has been holding slaves hostage since the Civil War and not told them that they were emancipated and they continue to work for him. And at the end of the story, there is violence done to the diamond as big as the Ritz and it releases the slaves. And one of the rich oligarchs in the story, who is the butt of Fitzgerald's joke, says, there goes, I forget what it is, but there goes something like, there goes a million dollars worth of slaves at pre-war prices. And so it's this very, very timely and modern recognition that American capitalism was built on slavery.

And it's an allegory of American monopoly capitalism is how the story works. So it reads as a fantasy, but it's actually underlying it is this allegorical satire that works really brilliantly. And that, I'd totally forgotten that when I reread it again for this, just how, it's just, you don't think, I mean, obviously there are allegorical elements in Gatsby, clearly, but that's not how you, as you say, that's not really kind of how you read the novel. But what, the whole conceit of this, what I love is that the reason that they have to lie

to the slaves and they have to do, that all sorts of other terrible things happen to preserve the value of this. If they basically told everybody that this diamond existed, the price of diamonds would crash because there would be enough diamonds to flood the market. It's a sort of brilliant conceit for how capitalism is always complicit in this, controlling.

It's not about the exploitation, straightforward exploitation of natural resources. It's about the kind of who controls the means of distribution. It's so clever, but it is genuinely funny. And the ending is, I just think, one of my favorite endings of any story. So the protagonist is a kind of a little bit of an antihero. He's a little bit of a Gatsby figure. Clearly, Fitzgerald has these themes kind of coalescing in his head at this point. He's called John T. Unger, as in hunger. Some of the comedy is a little bit broad and a little bit obvious. He comes from Hades. He comes from Hades. And his parents teach him as a tenet of

faith to worship wealth. And they would consider it heresy for him to do anything else. And he would consider it heresy for him to do anything else, which he would consider it heresy for him to do anything else, which of course is also how Gatsby is described in Gatsby, is that he must be about his father's business, which is that he's a son of an American god, and therefore he worships wealth. And so you can see Fitzgerald building these same themes, but in a much more overtly satirical vein, and as we're saying in this much clearer allegory, that this is about the founding of modern America. The monopoly capitalist is called Washington. So again, to make the allegorical points really, really clear. I also, I'm always struck how we have to be careful of reading retrospectively. And Sarah, you were saying how far ahead it's time this story is and

The Great Gatsby. And we read these things now knowing the Great Depression was coming in 1929, but that was not the case in 1922 and 1925. And that's just really, to me, interesting to think about Fitzgerald's understanding of the depth of what was going on. And where would you rate it in the pantheon? I mean, I was reading it again. You don't really have to read any of F. Scott Fitzgerald to find this story completely. You don't need to know any of the novels. It's a completely brilliantly fully realized story. Yeah, no, it stands completely alone. And I just want to pick up on Erica's point about his prescience as well, because it's incredibly important. And we have this cultural caricature of Fitzgerald as this kind of amateur genius who kind of stumbled

and accidentally wrote a novel, a masterpiece, but didn't really know how or why. And he just had this facility. And it does him such a disservice. It's such a caricature. And it's just stupid, actually, because nobody writes anything that is as subtle and brilliant as his books who doesn't have a very clear, conscious, intelligent understanding of the world that he inhabits. But, you know, so not only, as you say,

is this kind of stuff ahead of its, is this story ahead of its time? Is Gatsby ahead of its time? In 1926, he told a New Yorker journalist that war was coming in Europe. And he said, and it's, you know, within a generation, he was like, we're gonna have a war in Europe. He's also caricatured as an apolitical writer.

And one of the reasons why I like Diamond as big as the Ritz is that it's explicitly political. He's not interested in kind of electoral politics very often in his work, although it comes in a bit more than people think it does. But this is a totally political story. I mean, from start to finish, it's about politics. So for me, it's certainly in his top five stories, easily in the top 10 without controversy. And, you know, I'd have to think about which ones it's knocking out. But I think it's pretty clearly in the top five.

And as I say, for me, it's just a really important corrective to the kind of people's idea of this romantic, saccharine, lyrical Fitzgerald who at his best is Keatsian and incredibly beautiful and at his worst is, you know, as I say, is a bit saccharine. And the cliche of young love and, you know, dancing to jazz and all of this stuff. And this is this acidic satire about how American wealth and power works, which is what his great theme really was. Brilliant. We've got another parable next.

Maybe not quite as clearly allegorical, but your second choice, Erica. Yes, my second choice is a novel by Anne Patchett that was published in 1997. And I'm pretty sure it was the first Anne Patchett that I read. It's called The Magician's Assistant. And Anne Patchett, of course, is a much lauded American novelist. Now she has a new book coming out before too long called Tom Lake. And also just recently, she was awarded the 2021 National Humanities Medal by Joe Biden. So she's not someone needing recognition now, but she was kind of at the beginning of her career when The Magician's Assistant was published. And this is just a novel I absolutely adore, have reread many times. The first line is Parsifal is dead, and that is its opening.

is Parsifal is Dead. And that is its opening. And Parsifal is a magician, the magician in question. And Sabine was his assistant and his wife, although he was gay and at the beginning of the novel has just died of AIDS. And she is living in his lover's house, Phan, his Vietnamese life partner, mourning his loss and feeling that her life is over. And then she discovers something of Parsifal's past. And the novel ends up taking us from Los Angeles, where it begins, alliance Nebraska. And I love all of Ann Patchett's novels because I think she's just marvelous at creating character-driven fictions full of people you believe in and want to love. This is a really magical, and in some ways, as you say, you know, on the borderline between realism, magical realism, allegory, when exactly is it set? It doesn't really have a specific setting, although of course it addresses the AIDS epidemic. And I just love this book. And if you only know Anne Patchett from her later work,

I think this remains a kind of lesser known Anne Patchett. So I recommend it. I can give a little chunk of it if you want. There's a great review of it in The Independent by Penelope Lively, review of it in the independent by penelope lively who who sort of spotted her as a a talent to watch as you might say and she says that that she picks the thing that i really like about the book is that that um parsifal is that is a classic american hero the small time boy who's gone far from home and who has a mysterious past because you don't you discover it's only that when when his family arrives he he's created this whole myth that sabine the main character kind of buys into that he's from a wealthy connecticut family who all died in a crash and then suddenly these kind of these kind of plucky slightly combative uh nebraskans arrive and it turns out

that he wasn't Parsifal at all he was what's his name Fetters isn't it, he's got a great name and Guy Fetters that's right Alliance Nebraska Gee he sounds an awful lot like Jay Gadsby

I mean it's so bad isn't it not just like not just like jay gadsby but um i had just started to think about this problem you had set us john of of choosing these books and and the magician's assistant came into my mind and then i was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's a screenwriter. And he was saying that whenever he comes upon a problem in screenwriting and feels stuck, he will rewatch The Wizard of Oz. And watching The Wizard of Oz will enable you to solve any problem you have in storytelling. storytelling. And this too is a Wizard of Oz novel because it's about coming home, finding home, getting too far from home, finding yourself in a strange and mysterious place and needing to return to whatever your center is. And Alliance Nebraska also is not that far removed from

Kansas. Have you read it Sarah? Have you read? I haven't I've read a lot of Patchett but not this one so now I'm going to go read it. Yeah I mean if you were kind of trying to place Anne Patchett in the kind of the pantheon of contemporary I mean it we were talking about it again earlier was saying she is a page she's a literary novelist but she's an she is a page turning you-turning writer of stories that have elements of family saga, of romance, of history. I also think it's hard to write well about magic. Yeah. well about magic. And it can be forgotten that all magic from the slightest, you know, the smallest kind of close up magic, sleight of hand trick to grand illusion is magic is narrative. Magic is

making you believe a story, just a story told in another way. And I love the way that this novel combines magic and storytelling. Another critic in the New York Times used the word kindliness of Patchett's narrative. It doesn't sound like a terribly sexy kind of adjective for a writer to latch onto, but there is something incredibly, the slow revelation of Sabine's kind of, of her understanding herself through her grief. But I also think, I mean, at least as I haven't read this one, but I have read a good chunk of Patchett. And I think that a lot of her books and the books that I like the best of hers are also, she does think allegorically, I think, in these ways. And she finds these ways to connect her story to these bigger national and sometimes international themes,

although I think she does American themes better than she does the international ones. I'm personally not as big of a fan of her international novels. I'm not sure she nails those as clearly. But I actually was a huge fan of her recent novel, Commonwealth, which signals that American theme in its title. And I happened to review that one for The Guardian. And as far as I know, I certainly haven't seen another review since then. I feel like I was the only one who said this is an allegory about contemporary America. And everybody just read it as a family novel.

It is about family, but it's a novel about a family by a woman. And guess what? Everybody reads that as a domestic novel. And people don't see it as an epic of nation building. And that's what this is about. And it's about- And if she was Adam Patchett- Yeah, 100%.

That might be different. If she was Bredy Stenellis, they would be calling it the great novel of the 21st century. Jonathan Franzen, are you kidding me? They would be falling over themselves for this novel. So I do think that she has been, it's not outright misogyny. I mean, it is, but it's not of the sort that has, as you say, Erica, she just won the National Humanities Medal. We can't say that this is a writer who has been completely held back by her gender. But I honestly believe that anybody writing the books that she has been writing,

who was a man, would be clearly, we would not be having to make a case for her being one of the leading novelists of our day. It would absolutely be a critical commonplace. It would be a cliche, and she would not be the person that we would be bringing into a kind of omnibus episode of interesting writers. You would be like, no, we're devoting a complete episode of Backlisted to Ann Padgett by definition, you know? Well, again, she's making a strong face. Strong face. I also have to say that what's going to happen now,

I'm quite sure it's like, I'm going to have a kind of FOMO all the way through this episode, which is that every time something comes up, I'm going to think, oh, that's what we should have done. Because we should have done The Wizard of Oz very clearly. The Wizard of Oz should be one of the ones that we should be talking about. So I'm going to keep, oh, that's what we should have done because we should have done the Wizard of Oz very clearly. The Wizard of Oz should be one of the ones that we should be talking about. So I'm going to keep a running list of the other ones. Well, we'll stick, we'll definitely, we'll remind people in the show notes about the Wizard of Oz. That's,

we've had three, three down. Now that's a good moment for us just to take a pause while you listen to this message from our sponsors. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. pause while you listen to this message from our sponsors. p.m. late checkout. Just need a nice place to settle in? Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. Our next book, Sarah, is, again, completely unknown to me. I don't know whether that's because I'm English or because, but this is a remarkable book by Susanna Rosen called Charlotte Temple. And it is pretty much generally regarded as the first American bestseller, published in the UK originally, though, in 1791, and then in the US in 1794. It was in the US that it really

took off. Do you want to just give us a thumbnail of what this book is? Absolutely. So, yeah, Charlotte Temple is this, I think, incredibly interesting book on cultural phenomenon. And as you say, it kind of invents American popular fiction in important ways or kicks it off. It's the first really popular novel written in the post-revolutionary period. Although it's published in the UK and Susanna Rosen herself was born in Britain, she was also raised for part of her girlhood, if you like, her teenagers in particular, in Boston. Her father was in the British Navy and so he was probably stationed in Boston and so she went back and forth and then they were there in Boston when the revolution came. And so, of course, her father was

a loyalist and they kind of lost their American property and they had to refugee to Canada and then back to England. And then she eventually, she got married an Englishman and then made her way back to America. She's a really, really fascinating character. You know, Charlotte Temple is really interesting as a novel in its own right, but Susanna Rosen as an individual is also fascinating. She's a kind of Mary Wollstonecraft figure in that she was an educator who was female, but she was interested in the question of female education. And she was a polemicist. She was anti-slavery. She was a playwright, an actress, and she had already worked as a playwright and an actress by the time Charlotte Temple was published and kind of made her fortune in America. It was one of the reasons actress. And she had already worked as a playwright and an actress by the time Charlotte

Temple was published and kind of made her fortune in America. It was one of the reasons she moved back to America because it was so popular there. It was clear that that was where her audience was. And so Charlotte Temple is in the tradition of Clarissa. It's a novel of seduction. But it also, again, I'm coming back to allegories. I didn't intentionally choose a bunch of allegories, but I seem to have done so. I must be thinking allegorically right now. Because it has been read by scholars, particularly if people are interested. There are some wonderful essays by a scholar called Kathy Davidson that read Charlotte Temple as a kind of allegory of the American Revolution. As Charlotte is this character who's torn between two parents, British and American choices.

And is she going to go the British way or is she going to go the American way? And the kind of sense of dislocation in the story and dispossession as being very, you know, kind of typical of the way that people felt in the post-revolutionary era. And really recognizing that what we now think of as the American Revolution, or you may think of as the American War of Independence, was for the people who, I always have to do that, but was for the people who lived through it, a civil war. It was a civil war. It was a war of brother against brother and child against parent. And that was how they actually experienced it. So yeah, so Charlotte Temple is raised in England. She's a beautiful, really stupid, this is me interpolating, but dutiful and good and boring young woman. And at 15, she's in a seminary where her father's put her, you know, thinking she's going to get a good

education, but she falls into the hands of an evil French woman who's the headmistress and debauched. And she colludes in the seduction of Charlotte. And there's this wonderful moment where this, well, I say wonderful, I mean, I'm being facetious, obviously, but I actually find it hilarious. And this is a novel I have taught many times. And so there are certain moments that I remember and I enjoy teaching in it very much because I think that, well, I think they're fascinating for all kinds of reasons. But anyway, she falls into the hands of this guy called Montreville. He's trying to induce her to elope with him from the school. She's 15.

She knows she's not supposed to do it. She knows it's wrong, but he's really hot and she really wants to do it. And there's this kind of amazing moment where he's trying to get her into his carriage and she knows she shouldn't. And she says something like, heavens, what must I do? And then she faints. And so he swoops her up into the carriage and he abducts her and she wakes up on a ship, having been had sex with. And then she finds herself pregnant. And then, you know, people will be amazed to hear that it doesn't work out well for her. I don't want to completely plot spoil, but it is a novel of seduction

and things don't work out well for the seduced in such novels, especially when they're women. But what I love about that moment and what I think is so interesting about what it says about the novel and kind of the ways in which it works allegorically then is it's really a novel about female agency and it's a novel about female education. It's a novel about what happens when women are taught not to make

choices, when they're taught to faint instead of making a choice. And that actually what Susanna Rosen is saying, ladies, make a choice, like know what you're doing and understand the consequences here and don't just swoon because you don't know what to do. But it's also, I think, a wonderful way of kind of performing ambivalence of the fact that she suspends her agency because she doesn't know what to do. So she kind of just leaves it to fate. And fate in the hands of patriarchy, you know, takes over. So I often teach it and then I'll shut up because obviously I do teach it. I can go on and on and on about the things I think are interesting about the book. But it's a, so therefore it comes in the context of this educational program after the American Revolution about the things I think are interesting about the book. So therefore, it comes in the context of this educational program after the American Revolution about the importance of bringing up

Republican women to further the moral cause of revolution and to kind of strengthen the national identity and the importance, therefore, of educating women in this project. And that's partly why Susanna Rosen becomes this very interesting American figure, despite being born British and her kind of transatlantic identity is that she kind of commits herself to this Republican cause of educating young women to be stalwarts in political life, in political and civil life.

And it's really fascinating. Then there's a sequel, Lucy Temple, about what happens to her daughter, which is Moll Flanders' incest. But we can talk about that in the next episode. I just want to say that to make John feel better, because I, of course, am American, I had not heard of this book either. I am going to read it now. I'm also going to write a self-help book called Don't Just Swoon. I'll be the first customer. I mean, just a couple of things.

One is that Kathy Davidson said that this book replaced the Bible on the bed table of Americans. It was wildly popular with young girls. To the extent that they even created a shrine. There is a Charlotte Temple grave in a New York cemetery. And they actually thought it was true, right? Is it still there? I guess it must be. I'll go find it when I go to New York.

It was an absolute pilgrimage, exactly. And so the subtitle originally was A Tale of Truth. And all of these young women thought it was true. And it would have been a complete social media phenomenon, you know, of its time. And the other thing that struck me that most of the seduction novels, like Clarissa, were epistolatory novels, they were letters. This was a female narration that the narrator, Susanna Rosen, is narrating. This is before Jane Austen, right? This is... 20 years before.

And this is... So that, to me, struck me as something really, really interesting, that you were suddenly getting... You were getting a woman telling you about the inside of a woman's mind, not just, you know, the to-ing and fro-ing of letters. And she apostrophises young women. She makes very clear that young women are her readers, and she addresses them directly. And it is didactic, which sometimes modern readers can find irritating,

but it's really, really interesting, as you say, this project that she sits down to say, so yes, it's a cautionary tale about not being seduced, but that's the least of what it's actually doing. And its ideas about what it means to be a mature woman and the choices that you'll have to make are, again, you know, you have very far ahead of of its time. So Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rosen. Now, your last book, Erica, is a stone cold classic, I think, and one I have read, but not for many, many years. I read it like I guess a lot of a lot of English readers would have read it in the 1967

Puffin edition. It is. It is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. And I will just give a little flavor of it. Tess is nodding, which is a good sign. Very good. Excellent. We're all nodding. I hate being an odd man out, Meg said. It's hard on Sandy and Dennis, too. I don't know if they're really like everybody else or if they're just able to pretend they are. I try to pretend, but it isn't any help. You're much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren't, Mrs. Murray said. I'm sorry, Meglet. Maybe if father were here, he could help you, but I don't think I can do anything till you've managed to plow through some more time. Then things will be easier for you, but that isn't much help right now, is it?

Maybe if I weren't so repulsive looking. Maybe if I were pretty like you. Mother's not a bit pretty. She's beautiful, Charles Wallace announced, slicing liverwurst. Therefore, I bet she was awful at your age. How right you are, Mrs. Murray said. Just give yourself time, Meg. Lettuce on your sandwich mother Charles Wallace asked no thanks he cut the sandwich into sections put it on a plate and set it in front of his mother yours will be along in just a minute Meg I think I'll talk to Mrs. What's-It about you who's Mrs. What's-It Meg asked asked. So that's just a little conversation from The Marvelous Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal, I think in 1963, 62 or 63, the Medal for Children's Literature. Having failed, as is so often the story with books like this, I think she sent it, Madeleine L'Engle, she said she sent it to 40 publishers and 26 replied to say that they didn't want it. It got through to Charles Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, and was published and has been, as you say, a stone cold classic ever since. Although, and here we come to allegory again, it's a really weird book.

It's a really strange and peculiar book. But certainly for me, and one of the reasons, and certainly that Madeleine L'Engle's family, I think her daughter felt that it was rejected so often, is it was a science fiction book whose protagonist was a girl. a girl. And that was obviously inherently problematic. The story is that Meg Murray's father has mysteriously vanished. It's a very convoluted tale, but she is really on a mission with her genius brother, little Charles Wallace, to rescue him from what we discover is the Black thing, or is called the Black thing. And they end up, and looking at this novel again, you know, they end up on this planet called Camazotz, where everyone is trapped into doing the same thing and being the same way, and everyone is mesmerized. And it was really striking thinking about this book again, and Charles Wallace becomes

kind of trapped by this mesmerization as well. And Meg has to rescue him also. And I, looking at the book again, I just had this image of all of us sitting on the train staring at our phone screens. And there was Madeline Langell, you know, seeing this back in the early 60s. most recently by Ava DuVernay, who is a wonderful filmmaker, but I will refrain from saying what I think of the film. It may just be unfilmable. I mean, it strikes me as being almost impossible because it's, as you say, it's so odd. It's one of those books when you go back to it and you, you know, I've internalized so much of it over the years, I think, that the sense of that brain in a jar, you know, a kind of image, sort of everything being connected and somehow being trapped into this endless, cyclical, repetitive pattern is so powerful. Did you know it, Sarah? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You couldn't live in our generation in America

and not know A Wrinkle in Time and actually, you know, Madeleine L'Engle more generally. So, yeah, absolutely. It was like it was on every school list. And yeah, absolutely. But everybody loved it. I mean, it was one of those books you were supposed to read and you loved reading.

And I actually, I really loved, I got to the point where I kind of read all of Madeleine L'Engle and I liked her other series, too. I liked Meet the Austens, which a lot of people don't like, but is a much more ordinary. There's no sci-fi in it. It's not magical, realist. It's much more just a kind of young girl coming-of-age story. And, but they, you know, she's always interested in, she comes back to these same kind of philosophical, theological questions about the nature of time and the nature of relationships.

And she's wrestling with really, really, really profound questions for young people. And, of course, that's one of the reasons why A Wrinkle in Time was initially rejected so many times. It was supposed to be too challenging. It had too many philosophers in it. It had too many languages. It was just there was no way that, you know, that kids were American kids in the 70ss were going to read this, you know. And of course, you know, ate it up. I think, you know, she was a remarkable writer and she was one of those, she had one of those minds that was able to remember what it was like to be young and then to bring in all of the wisdom that she had accrued

as an adult. And so they are books full of wisdom, emotional wisdom, kindness, compassion, how to deal with death, how to deal with loss, how to deal with, but never patronizing, never, ever oversimplifying or infantilizing. If anything, as I just said, they were worried that the books were too difficult, asking too much of young people, but that's why young people love them, because we always rose to the challenge. And I'd also like to give a shout out to another book by, you know, an author more of our generation, but who was very influenced by Madeleine Langell. It was a wonderful book published in 2009, also a Newbery Award winner, called When You Reach Me, which is by a writer

called Rebecca Stead. And it is very much, it's about a sixth grade girl called Miranda, who lives on the Upper West Side. Shout out to the Upper West Side. But the whole book is in conversation with A Wrinkle in Time. So I would also recommend, I sneakily recommend that. It's wonderful to return to it. Okay, we're nearly there. We got the last one. And, of course, we're saving the biggest best-known book till last. Sarah, you have chosen for us.

I have chosen Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, which obviously everybody does know, lots of people will have read. I expect we shall get some, you know, complaints with the idea that Little Women couldn't have a standalone episode, and obviously it could, obviously it could. But, you know, when we said we were going to do this, you know, the kind of first way that John approached it was saying, you know, what American books that you love

that we haven't done a standalone episode on, you know, do you want to talk about? And so for me, when you say American novel that you love, I just think Little Women. So it's like, well, that's the obvious one. You know, there's a reason why it is as beloved as it is. And, you know, I think it is a novel that truly does stand the test of time in really surprising ways because it has this reputation for sentimentality, for being saccharine,

for being full of these idealized domestic situations, idealized family, these idealized young women, about imposing Victorian gender ideologies and about Jo having to learn her place in a man's world. And all of that stuff is there, and all of the book is about resisting that stuff. It's all about not accepting that. And it's all of the different ways in which young women found to resist that without actually completely marching out of society and being huck fin

and lighting out for the territory. But how do you accommodate yourself to a society that is completely in the interest of repressing you? And so it's a novel that enables all of these different ways of reading it. And it enables you, it grows with you as you come to it from, you know, instead of being a young woman identifying with Joe, you know, you read it again and you read Marmee's anger and Marmee's lessons in how to control your anger and this kind of flash of strength and you realize, flash is of strength, and you realize that, you know, that Mr. March, the father that they all adore, is completely useless and totally sidelined by the narrative, right? He's so useless that he's not there. And so the story is fundamentally not interested in him. So although it's paying lip service to the importance of father, and they all

adore father, and the patriarch is center of everything, he has almost no space on the page. Like, so for a story that's supposedly about imposing patriarchal norms, it's just not interested in the father. It's interested in women, and in the relationship of women, and how they make their way in the world and how they come to understand their place in it. And of course, it's a novel about the American Civil War. So for me, as somebody interested in the ways that American literature comes to terms with these kinds of big national questions and themes and ruptures, again, it's a novel that people can read without really paying attention to the Civil War, but it's there and it's absolutely central to what's happening in it. And it's a novel of women's education.

It's a novel about going to Europe, Americans abroad. There's some Henry James, you know, and Edith Wharton implied in it. I mean, the Amy subplot, the Amy and Laurie subplot is basically straight out of James or Wharton. So there's actually a lot going on in this novel. And I think that people who only know it through its reputation for sentimentality and for Victorian femininity either haven't read it carefully, haven't read it recently, or aren't doing it justice. Well, you see, I would be one of those people. Ha ha. Ha ha. Only what I confess on Backlisted. Because as a girl, you know, when everyone was reading Little Women, I could not read it. I told myself, you know, and I wasn't exactly what you're saying.

You know, I wasn't interested in stories that the way that one identifies, you know, always as a reader, but especially as a kid with Huck Finn, with Sparrow Hawk in Ursula Le Guin's, you know, wonderful books. So I always I always struggled with Little Women. So I know particularly now I've written a lot about the American Civil War. It's time for me to try again. And I promise that I will. Yeah, I also felt having talked about it, watched countless adaptations of it, I really, it's sort of, it's poor not to have read the actual text. So I mean, I'm making, we can make a joint pact erica that if uh if you read it i'll read it i mean this book was a phenomenon from the moment it was published right and it had a it has had an extraordinary kind of impact obviously on lots of you know everybody from

jk rolling to margaret atwood will tell you how how joe march in particular becomes a sort of model for female writers but i i think what i think as always sarah what's interesting is it's it's the subtexts and what else what else is going on and the and the kind of the i think that whole idea of the civil war and the civil war in fiction it's it's obviously such an important element of it also i was really struck by the fact that her her, the father, wasn't this kind of, he was a bit of a bastard and a very difficult man. And it's, yeah, fascinating. I was just going to say, I think that's why these idealized portraits are so interesting,

when you realize how much you can read them against the grain, that you can see the kind of determination to adore somebody because you've been told to adore him, but you really, really don't adore him. And there's a lot of anger in the book that comes through when you read it that way. And when you recognize that these women have been left on their own, but they're the ones who hold everything together. And so, yeah, so Bronson Alcott was part of, you know, he was that kind of, like Henry James Senior, actually, I mean, they were mates and they were the, you know, they were the kooks who sort of, you know, he was that kind of, like Henry James Senior, actually, I mean, they were mates, and they were the, you know, they were the kooks who sort of, you know, these crackpots who had these crazy theories, and, you know, Bronson Alcott tried to set up one of these,

you know, communes where there was all, everybody was going to live, you know, self-sufficiently and peacefully, and of course, it was the women who held everything together. While the men were off thinking deep thoughts and not picking the apples, it was the women who were actually like, okay, how are we going to make dinner? And how are we going to clothe our children? And how are we going to educate our children? And what are we actually going to do, you know, to keep body and soul together? And that's really how Alcott was raised. And that's a lot of the backstory of the book that, again, you know, kind of finds its way in. I'm sure that a lot of people will have opinions about about little women and it's it was i mean to love it in at the end is it doesn't of course doesn't do it justice but it's great i'm particularly pleased to to know

that erica is a uh is is you know is one of the people out there like me who hasn't read it and really ought to do something about it. Give it a shot. Brilliant. That, I'm afraid, is all we have time for, folks. Huge thanks to Erica and Sarah for steering us across the vast American literary plane. Also, huge thanks to Tess Davidson, who has or will weave a rich oral fabric out of our rough threads. Normal service, backlisted service, will be resumed soon, I promise. But in the meantime, there's nothing to stop you downloading all 184 previous episodes, plus follow links, clips, suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm.

And of course, we always love it if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Or you can support us directly through our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. For a modest sum, patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and entirely ad-free. And those who've subscribed to the LotListener level get two extra podcasts a month. It's called LotListed and features the three of us talking over the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. Anyway, thank you everyone for listening and for remaining so staunch and loyal in your support during our extended break. See you in a fortnight or so for the first episode of the new season. Any last thoughts from either of our two wonderful

guests today? Any other books uh that you kind of occurred to you as the discussion has been going i just like to think about all the threads connecting these books together even though we chose them kind of randomly for ourselves even thinking about you know thinking about a wrinkle in time and little women and absent fathers yes you know they're both books about absent fathers Time and Little Women and Absent Fathers. Yes. You know, they're both books about absent fathers. So I'll be, I'll want to keep stitching these books together in my mind. And yes, and anyone listening, do join in, particularly on the,

I know that on the Patreon boards, this kind of stuff they love. So if you see other connections that we've perhaps missed, do join in. I think there are loads. I mean, I also, I would love to do some more around the Civil War. There's lots of really interesting fiction there to think about. But also I did find myself thinking about Willa Cather and thinking about some of her lesser known novels, because she would also be interesting in this context, like Song of a Lark, which is her female buildings roman, which is not as well known as My Aunt Sonia or Pioneers, and is also really, really worth reading

for thinking about stories about young women, young American women coming of age. It's pretty special. Great. Well, your TBR piles are all now suitably enhanced. Thank you, everybody, for listening, as I say. And thank you, Sarah. And thank you, Erica. And see you all soon.

Bye.