Today I've been reading about Louise Mack, an Australian writer from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. I hadn't heard of her but she was a journalist, she wrote a bunch of novels, she was the first woman war correspondent in Belgium during World War I, and she had a book of poetry published in 1901 that's eighty percent the sort of nicely-scanning "I saw a flower / I stopped an hour" rhymes that you'd expect from a book called "Dreams in Flowers":
waters/daughters sleep/deep ah behold the bold world; you know the kind of thing, poems on the sag of a line between Christina Rossetti and Edna St Vincent Millay.
But then twenty percent of it is: not like that. For example, here's the end of a longish poem about how the dead would super hate to come back to life:
It's not that flowery poems from 1901 are never about death, but they're usually not written from the exhausted point of view of someone in the grave who just wants to stay there.
Or there's this poem, which just gets less expected as it goes on:
I love how many turns it takes! From "oh okay I guess this is a kind-of proto-feminist poem about how men are often not interested in what women are actually like as people" to "oh wait she ALSO doesn't know what HIS secret soul is like" to "...and that's... for the best! keep those souls secret! never reveal your true self! okay then!"
There's a few others in the book that I enjoyed, including one that might be about how it's a great idea to just bury your grief and never cry or address it (that one's called "Bury It Deep"), and a good one about leaving Australia.
But the thing I enjoyed more than any individual poem was the kind-of bump of the unexpected as I read through, like someone from 1901 was sitting beside me and occasionally whispering "I can't believe you thought everyone from the past was the same, just because we all used fancy capital letters". The disruption of that kind-of smeary homogenising view of history, like how things in the distance all look blue and blurry. I feel embarrassed, sometimes, that this is one of the pleasures I get from reading things from a while back, the weird personal specificity of someone from a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years ago. Surely it shouldn't be startling to me! And yet.
Mack died in 1935; for her last few years she was an advice columnist for the Australian Women's Weekly. I haven't read all her advice, and some of it is, as you'd maybe expect by this far down the post, odd ("WE WOMEN SKIM OVER OUR POTATOES AS IF THEY SIMPLY DIDN'T EXIST", all caps in original) but here are my favourite pieces of advice so far.
- "Going out to too many parties is a definite physiological menace"
- "A correspondent has written asking if I thought it right to say nice things when you don't mean them, and my advice is to say nice things and to mean them as much as you can"
- "I always feel sorry for spoiled children. I feel sorry for them because everybody detests them."
- "Swallow your pride. Let your friends know you can only play bridge for a penny a hundred. And if you can't play for a penny a hundred, swallow your pride again, and let them know that, too! You won't get so much bridge, but what does that matter in earnest days like these?"
