Posted by Ian Crouch
A few weeks ago, the headline of an obituary in the Times caught my eye: “Barbara Holland, Defender of Small Vices, Dies at 77.” A “defender of small vices”—what a fine title by which to be remembered, the kind of informal, appointed job that you didn’t know exists but then seems essential once you do. The obituary pointed me to Holland’s 1995 collection of short essays, “Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences.” In the preface, Holland explains the crisis she and her like-minded cohort—she often writes in an embracing first-person plural—faced during the last decade of the twentieth century:
To make sure we aren’t having any casual, private fun, the contemporary wisdom has withdrawn a lot of our older pleasures—chicken gravy, long summer vacations, cigarettes, martinis, sleeping late—and replaced them with fitness and gloom.
Fitness and gloom, a pithy summary of that decade—add recession, and you’ve got a good working definition of the first decade of this century, as well. Though the collection predates smart phones, social networking, and 9/11, it still feels spot on as cultural observation, and, in terms of charm, it’s timeless.
Holland’s sharp eye narrows at the absurdities of contemporary middle-class life. The modern workout, done for the glutes or abs but not the soul, gets especially rough treatment. “Exercise, to qualify at all,” Holland writes, “must be lonely, painful, humorless, and boring.” With sublime wit, she conjures her brother’s NordicTrack (remember those?) as “a sort of steel giraffe,” and adds,
He was never seen to operate the thing, but it was useful for hanging up one’s jacket or drying one’s underwear, and effective in breaking the toes of guests trying to find the light switch in the dark.
It’s fun to read Holland’s stylish rants, and fun also to imagine her holding forth at a cocktail party or commenting on the current lifestyle of hipsters or investment bankers. But her best mode is when she combines exuberance with well-honed nostalgia. This collection is more about joy than it is about despair.
On waking up: “Obviously the best possible time to wake up is in the June of our tenth year, on the first day of summer vacation.”
On baths: “The eyes closed automatically with luxury, and sometimes the bather fell asleep, slid under, and drowned, happy to the last.”
On smoking: “The passing of cigarettes leaves all phases of romance impoverished.”
On meeting an old flame for lunch: “Lunch with lovers, past, present, or possible, enjoys an anarchy, a severing of our connections to life’s duties, rather like the sea voyages of former days, when self-limiting flirtations flourished and responsibility dropped from one’s shoulders.”
Holland is no snob, but she clearly is of a people—the slightly dispossessed, those incredulous about the drift of society, the fun-loving—that exist at some imaginary point where the upwardly mobile professional and the downwardly mobile aristocrat meet. Some of her pleasures take real guts to defend, such as “Driving Beltless,” or the entry for “Disasters,” in which she argues for the perverse thrill we feel at witnessing the action and aftermath of tornadoes, floods, or explosions. But Holland is consistently self-aware, as the playful scold has to be. Though she laments the end of the housewife, the eradication of public smoking, or the emergence of physical fitness, she does so with the full acknowledgment that such developments represent progress, at least for general health. She is lighthearted but stern, and mostly amused—by the joys that she celebrates, and that so many of her neighbors seem inclined to deny themselves.
Her best advice, perhaps, comes when she sings in praise of the happy hour, the darkened bar, and the winding down of the day:
Then, knees touching, neck muscles relaxing, brow drying in the cold dry air, we should drink. Certain things were put upon this earth for our enjoyment, and it’s wasteful and wicked to condemn them.
Amen. Order a copy of this book for your worry-laden, type-A friend or lover. They’ll thank you. Or they may just miss the point.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Barbara Holland, Defender of Small Vices, Dies at 77
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: September 13, 2010
Barbara Holland, a writer whose humorous essays sang the simple pleasures of drinking martinis, cursing and eating fatty foods, and who wrote an evocative best-selling memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the Washington suburbs, died on Sept. 7 at her home in Bluemont, Va. She was 77.
The cause was lung cancer, her daughter, Emily Brewton Schilling, said.
In her essay collection “Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences” (1995), Ms. Holland put forward a hedonist’s credo.
“Joy has been leaking out of our life,” she wrote. “We have let the new Puritans take over, spreading a layer of foreboding across the land until even ignorant small children rarely laugh anymore. Pain has become nobler than pleasure; work, however foolish or futile, nobler than play; and denying ourselves even the most harmless delights marks the suitably somber outlook on life.”
She even mounted a defense of smoking, which, along with drinking, she identified as her principal hobbies. Appalled readers found comfort in her next collection, a celebration of rural life titled “Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: The Case for Cows, Orchards, Bake Sales & Fairs” (1997), but she returned to contrarian form in “The Joy of Drinking” (2007).
“I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym,” she explained to The Washington Post in 2007. “All of a sudden, we’ve got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I’m not really in favor of health and fitness.”
Late in her career, she drew on her childhood and youth to write the memoir “When All the World Was Young” (2005), a bittersweet account of growing up in the 1940s and ’50s. Critics responded enthusiastically to her compelling portrait of a sensitive, acutely observant girl desperate to find a place in the world, and the light touch with which she handled dark themes. “Imagine Lauren Bacall narrating ‘Tristram Shandy,’ ” Molly Jong-Fast wrote in The Chicago Tribune.
Barbara Murray was born on April 5, 1933, in Washington and grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., just across the District line.
Her mother, the former Marion Hall, was a Swarthmore graduate who studied law for a year at Columbia but gave up a career to marry and raise five children. She divorced when Barbara was quite young and married Thomas Holland, a lawyer for the Department of Labor.
Barbara loathed her stepfather, and his dark, looming presence inspired her vivid picture of patriarchy’s heavy hand in postwar America. “My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained,” she wrote. “Fathers were angry; it was their job.”
Her mother later wrote best-selling children’s books under the name Marion Holland, including “A Big Ball of String” and “The Secret Horse.” She also passed along a sharp, pithy verbal style. “Any fool can be a Yankees fan,” she once told her daughter. “It takes real talent to be a Senators fan.”
After graduating from high school, and undergoing an illegal abortion that she describes unsparingly in her memoir, Ms. Holland struck out on her own, landing on her feet with a low-level job at Hecht’s department store in Washington. For the first time she enjoyed independence, a cherished state to which she devoted a book, “One’s Company: Reflections on Living Alone” (1992).
While working as an advertising copywriter in Philadelphia, she began contributing short fiction, essays and articles to magazines like McCall’s, Seventeen, Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Her three marriages ended in divorce. Besides her daughter, Emily, of Sarasota, Fla., she is survived by two brothers, Nicholas, of Del Mar, Calif., and Andrew, of Kensington, Md.; two sisters, Judith Holland Clarke of New Hope, Pa., and Rebecca Holland Snyder of Pensacola, Fla.; two sons, Matthew Davis Schilling of Pottstown, Pa., and Benjamin Hall Schilling of Orlando, Fla; and two grandchildren.
Her other books included “Hail to the Chiefs: How to Tell Your Polks From Your Tylers” (1990), “Wasn’t the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon’s Fond Memories” (1999), “They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades” (2001) and “Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk” (2003). She also wrote the children’s books “The Pony Problem” (1977) and “Prisoners at the Kitchen Table” (1979).
Her fight for ground to stand on as a young woman remained central to her reading of the world. A steady paycheck and self-respect were the keys to her brand of feminism, not the allowance and room of one’s own proposed by Virginia Woolf. “No, Mrs. Woolf,” she wrote in her memoir. “A job, Mrs. Woolf.”
Published: September 13, 2010
Barbara Holland, a writer whose humorous essays sang the simple pleasures of drinking martinis, cursing and eating fatty foods, and who wrote an evocative best-selling memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the Washington suburbs, died on Sept. 7 at her home in Bluemont, Va. She was 77.
The cause was lung cancer, her daughter, Emily Brewton Schilling, said.
In her essay collection “Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences” (1995), Ms. Holland put forward a hedonist’s credo.
“Joy has been leaking out of our life,” she wrote. “We have let the new Puritans take over, spreading a layer of foreboding across the land until even ignorant small children rarely laugh anymore. Pain has become nobler than pleasure; work, however foolish or futile, nobler than play; and denying ourselves even the most harmless delights marks the suitably somber outlook on life.”
She even mounted a defense of smoking, which, along with drinking, she identified as her principal hobbies. Appalled readers found comfort in her next collection, a celebration of rural life titled “Bingo Night at the Fire Hall: The Case for Cows, Orchards, Bake Sales & Fairs” (1997), but she returned to contrarian form in “The Joy of Drinking” (2007).
“I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym,” she explained to The Washington Post in 2007. “All of a sudden, we’ve got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I’m not really in favor of health and fitness.”
Late in her career, she drew on her childhood and youth to write the memoir “When All the World Was Young” (2005), a bittersweet account of growing up in the 1940s and ’50s. Critics responded enthusiastically to her compelling portrait of a sensitive, acutely observant girl desperate to find a place in the world, and the light touch with which she handled dark themes. “Imagine Lauren Bacall narrating ‘Tristram Shandy,’ ” Molly Jong-Fast wrote in The Chicago Tribune.
Barbara Murray was born on April 5, 1933, in Washington and grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., just across the District line.
Her mother, the former Marion Hall, was a Swarthmore graduate who studied law for a year at Columbia but gave up a career to marry and raise five children. She divorced when Barbara was quite young and married Thomas Holland, a lawyer for the Department of Labor.
Barbara loathed her stepfather, and his dark, looming presence inspired her vivid picture of patriarchy’s heavy hand in postwar America. “My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained,” she wrote. “Fathers were angry; it was their job.”
Her mother later wrote best-selling children’s books under the name Marion Holland, including “A Big Ball of String” and “The Secret Horse.” She also passed along a sharp, pithy verbal style. “Any fool can be a Yankees fan,” she once told her daughter. “It takes real talent to be a Senators fan.”
After graduating from high school, and undergoing an illegal abortion that she describes unsparingly in her memoir, Ms. Holland struck out on her own, landing on her feet with a low-level job at Hecht’s department store in Washington. For the first time she enjoyed independence, a cherished state to which she devoted a book, “One’s Company: Reflections on Living Alone” (1992).
While working as an advertising copywriter in Philadelphia, she began contributing short fiction, essays and articles to magazines like McCall’s, Seventeen, Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Her three marriages ended in divorce. Besides her daughter, Emily, of Sarasota, Fla., she is survived by two brothers, Nicholas, of Del Mar, Calif., and Andrew, of Kensington, Md.; two sisters, Judith Holland Clarke of New Hope, Pa., and Rebecca Holland Snyder of Pensacola, Fla.; two sons, Matthew Davis Schilling of Pottstown, Pa., and Benjamin Hall Schilling of Orlando, Fla; and two grandchildren.
Her other books included “Hail to the Chiefs: How to Tell Your Polks From Your Tylers” (1990), “Wasn’t the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon’s Fond Memories” (1999), “They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades” (2001) and “Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk” (2003). She also wrote the children’s books “The Pony Problem” (1977) and “Prisoners at the Kitchen Table” (1979).
Her fight for ground to stand on as a young woman remained central to her reading of the world. A steady paycheck and self-respect were the keys to her brand of feminism, not the allowance and room of one’s own proposed by Virginia Woolf. “No, Mrs. Woolf,” she wrote in her memoir. “A job, Mrs. Woolf.”
The Transatlantic Literati
Thanks to the magic of AUP, we all had the chance to live and let live in Paris for three amazing years. And since then-- well, we've found ourselves just about everywhere!
So, to keep the memory of cigarettes, endless cups of cafe creme, nosiettes, and pints of beer from the Amex alive, all while debating something that Proust said, here is the inaugural post of the Transatlantic Literati bookclub!
So, to keep the memory of cigarettes, endless cups of cafe creme, nosiettes, and pints of beer from the Amex alive, all while debating something that Proust said, here is the inaugural post of the Transatlantic Literati bookclub!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)