"Her Weakness for Beauty Had Betrayed Her"

The Bookshop Book Club, Week 2

Hello, readers! This week you get two posts for the price of one. My regular post was getting long, so I decided to give The Bookshop book club its own post today. Enjoy!

I picture Florence’s bookshop looking a bit like this. Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash.

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For readers who are just joining us, or for anyone who hasn’t read The Bookshop but would like to participate, you can get biographical information about Penelope Fitzgerald’s time working in a bookshop in a town like the one in her novel here. Here’s last week’s post, on the first three chapters, and below is what happened in this week’s reading:

Florence opens the Old House Bookshop, and although she makes a few foolish business decisions, she also has allies in Mr Raven, the marshman; Mr Brundish, the local squire; and, especially, her employee, ten-year-old Christine Gipping. In these chapters, Florence’s biggest challenges come from the poltergeist, which is genuinely frightening; from Mrs Gamart’s relations, who pester Florence with requests that she organize exhibitions of their watercolors in the bookshop; and from Brompton’s, which supplies books for the shop’s library through a frustrating bundling system:

[Brompton’s conditions] were suggestive of a moral philosophy, or the laws of an ideal state, rather than a business transaction. The books available on loan were divided into classes A, B, and C. A were much in demand, B acceptable, and C frankly old and unwanted. For every A she borrowed, she must take three Bs and a large number of Cs for her subscribers.

Which leads to tussles when everyone in town wants to borrow the single copy of the biography of the Queen Mother.

After six months in business, Florence and her shop have become, if not a resounding success, at least a valued part of the community. And then Milo suggests that Florence sell Lolita, which he claims would “make money, you know, if the worst came to the worst”—prompting Florence to wonder “why this matter of the worst coming to the worst seemed to recur.”

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People nowadays may not realize how controversial Lolita was in 1959, the year in which The Bookshop is set.

A first edition of Lolita, including the second volume that Milo has lost. I found this image here.

Lolita first came out in 1955 in France in a limited edition from The Olympia Press, which usually published pornography. A few copies were smuggled into England, which is how Graham Greene was able to read it and write the rave review mentioned in The Bookshop. Because Lolita fell afoul of British obscenity law, it seemed unlikely that the book could be published there. However, in 1958, a new obscenity law was proposed. The new law would allow people to defend an allegedly obscene work based on its artistic merit, and numerous literary luminaries did advocate for Lolita in Parliament. By the end of October, some 20,000 copies of Lolita were sitting in bookshops throughout England, as booksellers awaited legal permission to begin selling them. On Guy Fawkes Day,¹ officials gave booksellers the go-ahead, and the book quickly became a sensation. (You can find these facts and much more information in this article.)

Florence is apparently unaware of or indifferent to this controversy, because her sole criterion for whether to sell the book is, Is it a good book? Do you think Florence would be smart to stock Lolita? Is Milo giving her good advice or laying a trap?

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Below are a few quotes that show Fitzgerald’s wonderfully subtle sense of humor. For example, on Mrs Gamart’s thwarted social-climbing:

It was well known that Mrs Gamart, as patroness of all that was of value in Hardborough, would have liked to count [Mr Brundish] as a friend, but since she had been at The Stead for only fifteen years and was not of Suffolk origin, her wishes had been in vain.

Or on the kind of book that older men prefer: “[B]ooks by former SAS men, who had been parachuted into Europe and greatly influenced the course of the war; . . . [and] books by Allied commanders who poured scorn on the SAS men.”

Or on how all the greeting cards are either Romantic or Humorous, “the only two attitudes to the stages of life’s journey envisaged by the manufacturers of the cards.”

What are your favorite passages, readers? Please share them in the comments!

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And now for some discussion questions.

What did you think of Christine Gipping? How do she and Florence complement each other? Did you enjoy, as I do, Christine’s bluntness? (When Florence says Christine doesn’t look old or strong enough for the job, Christine responds, “‘You can’t tell from looking. You look old, but you don’t look strong.’” Or there’s how she announces, “‘I like this old tray. . . . You can put that down for me in your will.’”)

We also have a new symbolic animal—the broody hen, a “slumbering mass of feathers. The old fowl was sunk into a soft tawny heap, scarcely opening her slit-like eyes. Her whole energy was absorbed in producing warmth.”

My friends Sarah and Emily have several pet hens, which Sarah calls “our dumb little dinosaurs.” This is Clement. Photo by Sarah.

And a few questions just for fun:

• Can you solve the problem in Christine’s exam? Which number do you think comes next in the sequence 8, 5, 12, 9, 22, 16? Or is the whole point that no one can solve this puzzle?

• Would you have taken a drink from the spigot stuck in the fermenting vegetable marrow?

• And what do you think the “green succulent weeds” that Mr Raven shows Florence—which don’t appear in official guidebooks and which would “fetch a high price” if they were sold in London—could be?

Please share your answers, thoughts, and questions in the comments!

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For next week, let’s read chapters 7 and 8. I’m looking forward to our discussion!

The Tidbit

Even if you are not usually a podcast-listener, I highly recommend Lolita Podcast. In nine entertaining episodes,² Jamie Loftus discusses the influence and meaning of Lolita in our culture and asks why people have misunderstood the book so badly,³ plus much more.

1. I can’t help thinking that Parliament was being intentionally ironic when they chose Guy Fawkes Day for the release of such a revolutionary book, given that the holiday celebrates the defeat of a radical plot to overthrow the government.

2. There are actually ten episodes, but honesty compels me to confess that I skipped the one on Lolita fashion because it sounded boring.

3. Permit me a brief rant. All the film adaptations of Lolita present Dolores Haze not as the victim of heinous sexual abuse, but instead as a savvy seductress who is well aware of her charms and who uses them to manipulate poor old Humbert Humbert. In our culture, “Lolita” is still a name for a sexy young temptress.

But any minimally attentive reader will know that Nabokov’s intention was precisely the opposite. The book’s preface tells us that Humbert wrote the manuscript while in prison, in an attempt to curry favor with the jury in order to avoid the death penalty. So Nabokov alerts us at the beginning that the story will be highly biased in Humbert’s favor. And even given this bias, Humbert mentions such heartbreaking details as Dolores crying herself to sleep every night and of dying in childbirth while still a teenager. Plus we know that Humbert is a murderer! In my opinion, anyone who clings to the view that Humbert is an anti-hero brought down by his love for an unworthy brat has some unsavory motivations for reading the book in this way.