From the Scripts and Voice-over commentary: Downton Abbey

Susannah Buxton, Costume designer for Downton Abbey

Caroline McCall, Assistant Costume Designer (from Feature on Season 1 DVD)

Dear friends and readers,

Last night I find myself again regretting that the older Poldark films have never been produced on DVDs with features with talk from the film-makers and actors; there has been no voiced-over commentaries with slowed-down parts, or any of the kind of commercial paraphernalia a sociological event best-seller of the Poldark type have begun to accumulate around them since the later 1990s. Here we do have some real use for the fandoms who might be said to serve as a tangible target for money-making on the Net. Beyond Graham’s Poldark’s Cornwall, only part of which was about the mini-series, the only book produced was Robin Ellis’s Making Poldark, now in a third reprinting, most of it the same text he originally produced (it has autobiographical additions and better stills).

From recent DVD feature on The Haunting (see review)

It may be much of the original cast is now dead (most of the principals are), but I’ve listened to and watched a DVD of the 1963 Robert Wise film of Shirley Jackson’s Haunting, where what was left of directors and writers and the cast produced intelligent insightful features and voice-over commentary — I took substantial notes on how the film was made. I suspect Poldark as a film still suffers from its original labeling as “swash-buckling soap opera,” and its not having had a widely-prestigious and single auteur type (instead many directors, writers, directors). By contrast, Downton Abbey now has had at least two books (The World of, The Chronicles of) and the first of three projected scripts produced.

Extras dressed right, intermingling make for fuller seeming reality (The World of discusses the making of such scenes)

Since I last wrote about Downton Abbey I’ve re-watched all the parts of the first season, read the playlets or scripts for all but the seventh part of the first season, and begun slowly to re-watch the parts again this time with voice-over commentary. Here is a little of what I’ve learnt about the power of these films (and by extension other costume dramas). I should say that I can stay up to all hours watching, absorbed, interested, enjoying them more; they take my mind off my recent intense anxiety. Reading the scripts reveals unexpected depths and parallels; cut scenes add much; Fellowes’s notes are ironically instructive. The voice-over commentary and especially watching the film move slowly gives you a chance to see how carefully each shot was cut, shaped, contextualized. We get the personal urges of Fellowes again and again — perhaps that’s the key to the strength of this and other films, this psychosocial projection drama.

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The scripts in general

The pathos of Molesley’s father so grateful is seen in several of the older lower class males (Matthew’s father)

Gwen the parallel figure who needs encouragement

Part 1 as I said was introduction, by Part 6 I saw that hours that seemed centrally silly (it ends on the flower show) when read silently and slowly as with a novel, come out touchingly suggestive. Much of what’s omitted hurt the programs: when in Part 4 Miss Obrien brings Daisy to confide what happened in Mary’s room (how soap opera this kind of sentence is) in the program the camera cuts away. We know what Daisy has to tell. In the script Edith is very kind to Daisy; we hear here how Daisy has been suffering under the harassment and insults of Mrs Patmore and how in need of some comfort she is (quite apart from seeing the dead corpse pulled along), and Edith does provide this. It’s double edged as Edith now (understandably I think) wants to get back at Mary for needling her over Strallan and Matthew but it is real and a parallel to Sybil helping Gwen.

Matthew comes out as ambiguous throughout, far more questionable at times, in his mockery of Edith and his sidling up to Mary; he is as complicit and collusive in this penultimate part (supposedly unimportant) flower show hour as his mother with her overt pressuring of Violet to give up the prize. The Chronology of DA emphasizes origins of characters and how Fellowes sees them. As Matthew moves away from his supposed love, Lavinia, he has a peculiar expression on his face:

Ever harboring guilt, Mary appeals to his less noble side

In several skeins of interweave it’s not too much to see that there is a Chekhovian rhythm to this hour as written up (like some of the earlier film adaptations, say 1983 MP) which is wholly lost in the actual realization’s quick pace.

Staring at and covering the corpse

Conspirators

Part 3 is hectic: This is the one where Lady Mary goes to bed with Pamuk and he drops dead while (presumably) trying to fuck her. It is also the one where Gwen’s desire to be a secretary is outed by Miss Obrien exposing the typewriter which Mrs Hughes says Gwen has no right to keep in Gwen’s room. The room is not Gwen’s, not even the bed she sleeps in is hers in private. We also have Mr Bates trying to escape the mean teasing and attempts to fire him by wearing a contraption that is torture.

In Fellowes’s notes he shows he realizes Mary is dense (he mentions her surprise anyone could not want her), but he is more concerned he says that viewers wrote in because they thought what was implied was (wait for this) Pamuk buggered Mary (!). Lines had been left out about her losing her virginity and what to do about it and so now he was sorry these were left out. My sense that people hardly ever say what they think and what is presented as mainstream thinking is utterly shallow was confirmed. I admit I had not thought of that – that he forced anal intercourse on her would have hurt and shocked her perhaps and she would not have so regretted the loss — but did think maybe we were to see Pamuk could go with men or women and that’s really why he was with Napier.

This time I’m confirmed in the idea that Mary is a real horror, cold and mean (she could care less about what Gwen is doing with her life) and Pamuk a cad. The irony is that Mary doesn’t see that Napier was a good candidate for her, showing really she doesn’t deserve him. I felt again for Edith, though she shows no compassion or concern for anyone but herself – as Sybil does trying to help Gwen who really despairs in her heart anyone will want her as a low person originally. In his notes to this scene Fellowes confirmed he was aware that the lower class person would not dream he or she could succeed and thus probably would not. It did seem to me the throwing away of the awful contraption is the equivalent of getting rid of the corpse of Pamuk and somehow connected to the typewriter — all sources of guilt, harassment.

Gwen after having been berated, told she had no right to have this in her room, ostracized, takes away her offending property

In the script to the fourth part, Fellowes thinks the film-makers omitted the whole of the scene below. But watching I find they hadn’t. I begin to wonder how much he worked on his notes — fact-checking is non-existent that I’ve seen. But at any rate I scanned it in because I found it touching. Maybe it was intended to omit it and the last minute put back. t was “not needed” — as part of the action. I reprint it to show that the plays as written in this book show 1) the show was not conceived by Fellowes as tongue-in-cheek at all, and 2) they all thus far make Grantham our hero of decency, fairness, even egalitarianism of a paternalist sort. It anticipates Lord Grantham believing Bates innocent later on, and when Bates returns from prison telling him to take some time off, rest, read books, go into the library:

Upon being invited to take books out and read them, Branson becomes animated and tells his favorites

3 INT. LIBRARY. DOWNTON. DAY.
Robert is working, with Pharaoh at his feet. Carson enters.
CARSON: You wanted to see the new chauffeur, m’lord.
ROBERT: Yes, indeed. Please bring him in.
Carson nods and a young man, in his thirties, appears. This
is Tom Branson. He is attractive and polite. Carson leaves.

ROBERT: Come in, come in. Good to see you again …
Branson, isn’t it?
BRANSON: That’s right, your lordship.
ROBERT: I hope they’ve shown you where everything is?
And we’ve delivered whatever we promised at the
interview?
BRANSON: Certainly, m’lord.
ROBERT: Good.
Robert nnds him rather an interesting character.
ROBERT: How did you first come to be a chauffeur?
BRANSON: My father was a tenant of Mrs Delderfield’s and
I was apprenticed to the chauffeur there. But he’d been
a coachman and he didn’t have much feeling for cars. In
the end, the mistress asked me to take over.
ROBERT: Won’t you miss Ireland?
BRANSON: Ireland, yes, but not the job. She was a nice
lady, but she only had one car and she wouldn’t let me
drive it over twenty miles an hour. So it was a bit …
well, boring, so to speak.
Which makes Robert laugh. Branson looks around.
BRANSON: You’ve got a wonderful library.
The remark does not offend Robert but it does surprise him.
ROBERT: Are you interested in books?
BRANSON: Not in books, as such, so much as what’s in
them.
A reading chauffeur? Unusual. Robert thinks for a moment.
ROBERT: You’re very welcome to borrow books, if you wish.
BRANSON: Really, m’lord?
He is astonished and delighted. Robert nods.
ROBERT: There’s a ledger
use, even my daughters.
room’s empty.
BRANSON: Do all the servants enjoy the same privilege?
ROBERT: I suppose they could, although I doubt they’d
avail themselves of it. Carson and Mrs Hughes sometimes
take a novel or two. What are your interests?
BRANSON: History and politics, mainlyROBERT: Heavens.* Well, when you come
back, you should
start looking in that section, there.t
Carson has reappeared at the door.
ROBERT: Branson’s going to borrow some books. He has my
permission.
CARSON: very good, m’lord.
Does Carson approve? Probably not. He looks at Branson.

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Typical notes by Fellowes:

The Irish troubles were a hot topic throughout this period, much more even than in the 1970s. We remember the Suffragettes and the emergence of the unions, but in fact if we’d been alive at that time the front page would have been dominated by Ireland, so here Branson is bringing those troubles to Downton. Because, by this stage, the show had developed its own method of dealing with these things. We don’t usually introduce famous characters like Lloyd George or Curzon or De Valera, but we allow our characters to refer to political events and scandals and things that were happening. To achieve this, to make the Crawleys and their servants aware of what was going on, I had the idea of bringing in an Irish chauffeur who was political and a republican. He is not active, in the sense of being a freedom fighter, but he is energetically pro-independence for Ireland. It seemed to me that such a chap would allow us to talk about the topic without its seeming contrived. I also thought – although only vaguely when I was writing this episode – that we might have a cross-class romance at some point and so it seemed a good idea that he should be young and handsome, whether or not we actually did anything with it. The actor who plays Branson (Allen Leech) had worked with me and our producer, Liz Trubridge, on a film I wrote and directed, called From Time to Time. He impressed us both and he had a kind of gritty, very real sort of good looks, as opposed to the face of a film star, which is more useful in this kind of drama.

I was sorry they cut this section, when Robert invites Branson to borrow books. It was taken from Below Stairs by Margaret Powell, whose memoirs of a life in service have just been reissued, for which I wrote the preface. She takes a fairly jaundiced view of the world but she was operating in smaller
households than Downton, where she was only one of two or three servants and they worked like dogs. But, once, she does go to a grander house on a temporary basis to replace a cook, and there all the servants were encouraged to borrow books from the library. When I read it, I thought it was rather a
nice touch and quite Robert’ish. Since I knew it was based on truth I was looking forward to being attacked but in the event it was cut. Naturally, Carson can’t bear the idea.

Carson as seen in the scene below

BRANSON: Is that all, m’lord?
ROBERT: It is. Off you go and good luck.
Branson goes, leaving master and butler alone.
ROBERT: Well. An Irishman with an interest in politics …
Are we mad?
CARSON: I could always bring in fire drill for the staff.
ROBERT: Thank you, Carson.
They share the moment.
ROBERT (CONT’D): He seems quite a bright spark after poor
old Taylor.
Carson is not prepared to volunteer an opinion. Yet.
ROBERT: I always thought he was happy. Why did he want
to leave?
CARSON: I believe it was Mrs Taylor, m’lord. She felt
cut off. She wanted to live in a town.
ROBERT: But running a tea shop? I cannot feel that’ll
make for a very restful retirement, can you?
CARSON: I would rather be put to death, m’lord.
ROBERT: Quite so. Thank you, Carson.
with a glance at the dog, he returns to his letter.

Lord Grantham amused

I liked the joke too, now this tea-shop part was omitted

One of the many things I like about serial storytelling is how a later part harks back to the earlier. In Part 4 we also get the slowly developing love of Anna for Bates; we saw her pity for him, her respect, her bringing him a tray when she and he thought he was fired, and she watched him cry; now in this episode he brings her a tray during her bad cold and in the script we can read the scene slowly.

It’s through this syntagmatic (is the word) development that these series gets their depth. Of course it contrasts to Mrs Hughes giving up her love, Daisy making an error in falling for the lesser man, Thomas. All brought together in the moment of ferocity when Bates threatens Thomas for needling and mocking William, that foreshadowing the reality of his pent-up violence … he is the one real justfiably angry man of the series.

The script to Part 6 is a deepening of the seriousness and suggestivity of the Scripts 1-5. You really feel for example how the relationship between Branson and Sybil has a genuine basis in their natures, their predilections, his reading (John Stuart Mill you now see), her ideals. Talking seriously:

The show does not have enough time and is in a way — however paradoxical this is — too effectively presented dramatically. You lose the hidden novel in the quick-paced creamy-pop appeal that all the filmic techniques project.

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Downton Abbey 1:1: from the voice-over commentary

Crowborough frantically rifling Thomas’s drawers in search of their love-letters; POV the naive Lady Mary

Bates coming upon them, ironically offers to let them investigate his room, upon which Lady Mary apologizes out of her habit for doing so when she’s in the wrong

As I wrote, it was not until I watched very slowly, this time having read the script, clicking and snapping on the stills and then studying them (the way the film is put together) that I realized the real motive for the Duke of Crowborough’s visit was to go up to that attic and snatch back his love letters to Thomas Barrow.

In the case of this series, part of my absorption is a kind of fascinated horror at what the whole thing reveals about what audiences like, what they think when they are watching — for in the scripts Fellowes includes many notes telling of what viewers have written to the film-makers. The commentary has
Fellowes and his partners (the producer for season 1 and director of this part) continually upholding this fantasy world as good and wonderful and real (so from the point of view of understanding the film dead wood), a kind of bland hypocrisy, their “job” whatever hype is expected they’ll utter.

Fellowes is the best of the three because he really believes in what he is presenting and is unashamed. Amid or sometimes after his fatuous kinds of naive statements he will suddenly say what he intended to do in a scene, comment on how he sees the actors, what they are doing, why this one is dressed this or that way (costume so important in costume drama). Two examples, when near the close Anna visits Bates with the
tray of food all three suddenly say these are their ‘favorite pair’ and there is suddenly a discussion of the lighting, the words (which insist he’s going to be fired), the depth of feeling in the scene, the lighting. As important in these
over-voice commentaries, the scene moves much slower.

The paired scenes sandwiching this are of Crowborough getting the naive Mary to take him to the servants’ quarters so he can find and get back his letters to Thomas and Thomas’s visit as a footman to Crowborough’s room. The latter is the first place in the whole hour all formality is dropped and we get two human
beings confronting one anther for real.

Plain talking, natural gestures (Crowborough)

I don’t believe it was the two males’ ideas to kiss so lovingly, but at any rare they do it so touchingly and yet we know how no humane feeling lies beneath it (so a contrast to the Bates/Anna scene in the attic which just precedes it — see first two stills) and again light, words, gestures and it’s the real climax of all the scenes in the part — and it undermines all the fatuity about how the show supports the order in front of us.

Fellowes also confirmed for me that Miss Obrien is really meant to be the person who had no belief in this system and hates it. He does not like her for this at all, and thinks it condemns her. But we may think differently even if we don’t
like her personally. He described Maggie Smith as a kind of crow in this part: also exposing the humbug but from her self-interested perspective. He kept pointing out how often she is in black with black hats.

Fellowes saw in this hat an allusion to a hawk

He personally finds Elizabeth McGovern very pretty as an older woman and remarked on this as they watched the last bedroom scene.

While she is often in black (they are all supposed partly in mourning), not always, and I could see he liked her as a simulacrum of an older wife he could quite imagine himslf “having” …

Ellen

Ronald Colman & A Tale of Two Cities

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. — Last sentence of 1935 and Dickens’s ATOTC

Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the closing moments of the 1935 MGM A Tale of Two Cities

Random Harvest — like Lost Horizon the film may be “read” as anti-war

Dear friends and readers,

When I was 12 or 13 my screen idol was Ronald Colman. I remember my love for him best in A Tale of Two Cities and Talk of the Town, which in the way Million Dollar Movie (Channel 9, local NYC metromedia station) operated in the 1950s I saw every night for 5 nights and all day Saturday and Sunday each time they were scheduled. At the time I used to tell anyone who would listen (not many, probably just my father) that were I to tell any of the girls in school my heart-throb was Ronald Colman, they’d stare and ask me, who’s he? Girls my age then loved Frankie Avalon, Frankie Valli (The Four Seasons). Looking back I guess I never told anyone lest I appall anyone.

Not that Colman was not — as well as self-contained, strongly ethical, seeking personal fulfillment, sad, wistful, noble, deeply disillusioned, looking away ironically, quizzically, averted eyes — beautiful in the 1920s in the way of matinee idols. This may still be seen in the 1935 film when he talks with Lucie in the garden in a scene which in the novel may correspond to Dickens’s idealization of his relationship with Ellen Ternan (for whom he had brutally ejected his wife just as he was writing A Tale of Two Cities):

Around that time I managed to watch the 1937 Prisoner of Zenda and just loved Colman’s gay and bitter ironies and thought him so alluring as a swashbuckler against Barrymore, Jr (I’ve not forgotten their thrilling sword fight down a turning stairway over a cliff uttering with many a bon mot at one another);; I saw a much mangled censured version of Lost Horizon which I also read (Hilton’s novel), and then decades (when I was in my later 50s) later replaced some years ago in my memory by reading buying a re-digitalized, newly restored (to an original version not seen in the theaters) DVD (complete with commentary and features) at the same time as I added to my repertoire Random Harvest (1942 MGM, also based on a Hilton novel); his very last performance of Othello in a 1948 Universal adaption of Othello, as actor and character, A Double Life. There is a worth while analysis of Random Harvest in Brian McFarland’s Novel into Film:

and of Under Two Flags (with Claudette Colbert and which I’ve never seen) by Victoria Szabo (“Love on the Algerian Sands: Reviving Cigarette”) in Women at the Movies, Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack:

Adapted from Ouida’s (Louise de la Ramee) novel

I’ve even managed a totally silent DVD of the 1925 Romola where Colman played a tenderly brother-type (not in the novel) to the heroine.

The trouble is I know these few films do not begin to cover those Colman acted in. While it’s true he sued Samuel Goldwyn for insinuating he was a depressive alcoholic and was neither (at all), I’ve learned that the suit helped his career. He was being given shallow silly parts, cliched roles, and he was quickly scooped up by MGM and Fox and went on to do some of his best work in the later 1930s. The books to read and peruse are the somewhat hagiographic R. Dixon Smith, RC: Gentleman of the Cinema, and the encyclopedic Ronald Colman: A Bio-bibliography by Sam Frank.

Still, after watching the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities, and liking it better each time (though it is anti- the French revolution) I put this still from the film on the wall. It is Colman as Carton standing outside the Darnay home looking in (a sort of Stella Dallas):

I’ve now bought myself a re-digitalized 1938 Paramount The Light that Failed (Colman as Rupert Kipling’s failed painter) and await the DVD from Amazon eagerly).

with Ida Lupino, a dual Snake Pit

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I watched the 1935 MGM ATOTC as well as the 1958 Rank ATOTC — with Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and the 1989 mini-series ATOTC, with James Wilbry as Carton, scripted by Arthur Hopcroft (who scripted the 1988 BBC Bleak House) because with a few people on Inimitable-Boz, I’d been reading & discussing Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

I had last read it in my senior year in high school so that’s 41 years ago, and yet as I read parts I remembered them. This time I’m finding it a seriously flawed book. Again and again there are long astonishingly insightful and indeed prophetic passages on endless unjust imprisonment; state-fomented paranoia; torture and humiliation of people then murdered by the state, and then psychotic madness of people do tortured (Dr Manette’s fits); an understandable crazed need for revenge after a life of ravaging injustice (the knit, knit, knit chapter) — but then these are not rooted in any sound analysis of the history of the era, or human nature as it is, but instead we get a melodramatic story. We see a man try to change his identity because he rightly cannot bear the one imposed on him (Darnay), but we are given no reason for, no understanding of Carton’s depression, alcoholism, despair. He is a character without a past, no context. How did Carton end up Striver’s jackal. We are not told.

We see this abysmally poor man’s child run over and grief jeered at — no wonder Gaspard seeks to murder the killer-blight on his life and all those around him.

But then a history of the time would emphasize these new principles and from what I’ve read of Carlyle he certainly does. Carlyle’s French Revolution (a possible source) is very hard reading — at least I find it opaque. The style is madness.

The question would be, how does a novelist dramatize these ideas? what plot-situation or dramatic scenes can convey them? Hugo resorts to outright chapters of idea- and history. I like these very much and think he carries it off splendidly, but now English translations of his Les Miserables actually put these in the back of the book, as if they were appendices and it’s hard to figure out where they came. One forgets they are there so forgets to read them.

Dickens’s story tends to criminalize the people making the revolution – as they are the perpetrators of the false trials of Darnay. They are presented as crazed and only a couple of anecdotes and stories produced to justify why they are seething with fear and rage. Darnay is Carton’s double and he figures a modern alienation: he does not want the identity imposed on him; he attempts in good faith to build a new life, but finds he cannot escape the past, his roots, his property even, and those around him will not let him escape what his uncle did before him.

As to the films: I watched the 1935 ATOTC twice and the 1958 ATOTC with Dirk Bogarde in the leading role, it shone. The 1958 film is a close imitation of the 1935, step-by-step influenced, but the changes were often deviations into something less believable and fudged (meaning the politics of the film). Especially the characters of Sydney Carton and Miss Manette. 1958: Dirk Bogarde was directed to play the part of an alcoholic who has given up on life without quite saying why; the typology really feel into a ne’er-do-well Skimpole (from Bleak House). Since I’ve seen Bogarde playing greatly (Night Porter, The Servant) I know he was directed into this. Elizabeth Allen believed in her role in 1935 and had an intense sort of femaleness; poor Dorothy Tutin (1958) was embarrassing as Lucie Manette; she didn’t believe the character for a moment and was told to make her voice high.

Colman really played the part of a depressed man, disillusioned by all he’s seen. gayly, poignantly ironic — he was typed this way in other films (Lost Horizon) and as I wrote at one point in his career sued the studio for insinuating this was his real character in life and broke his contract (he had some courage and integrity). The actors in 1935 were closer to Dickens’s world and were better at the grotesques, especially I admit Edna May Oliver and the woman enacting Madame Defarge as well as Basil Rathbone as her evil nemesis who destroyed her family.

From the totally wild self-abjecton and tender chapter of Sydney declaring his love, a chapter undermining masculinity, i 1935 they carried it off, especially since in the 1935 movie it was followed up by slight montages and vignettes suggesting in fact their relationship deepened and was part of their mutual lives for a few years to come. The dialogue reappears even in 1989. Hopcraft just didn’t drop it.

Not that there were no moments in 1958: Leo McKern was the lawyer attacking Darnay, and Donald Pleasance a young Barsad, the spy. Both films are hurt by the excess of sentiment and filming at studio lots. The 1958 could have been more political; it was eschewed, but the individual portraits hit home: the 1958 Mr Manette put me in mind of the prisoners now starving to death in Gitmo, there for more than 11 years, many innocent of any crime but being in Pakistan and poor and known to be leftist in sympathy during the time the bribing scheme was on. The prisons too — they brought to mind our own huge prison industry and people put away in solitary confinement for years and years.

1989: Although the film with James Wilby as Carton and Serena Gordon as Lucie was probably more effective for a modern audience, it was inferior to the 1935. Again it hinges on Carton: John Wilby actually played it as something like a gothic wanderer: he was filmed as a Byronic type. Unlike both Colman and Bogarde, the alcoholism was marginalized.

Wilby plays the role as the outsider, the man who does not belong, a man apart, alone

The real problem with this character seems to be is he’s absolutely socially unacceptable to a wide audience and only the 1935 group had the nerve and only Colman the ability to play it.

It’s as if with each new version the film-makers departed more from the first try by getting rid of every good touch in the ’35 movie: one of my favorites is when (1935 movie) the people are jeering at Colman and others in the cart, and laughing at him especially, the actor says, “don’t laugh, and some words about the nature of the person or what’s happening there the man doesn’t understand.” Coming from Barsad that’s one of the finest moments in all 3 films.

Hopcraft was the writer and he wrote the 1988 Bleak House and that was excellent yet here he falls into the trap of having the actors do these fake semi-Frenchified voices and behaving in this stilted manner to indicate their Frenchness. It reminds me of the way Arab people are often represented on TV, as “different.” (A rare one not to do this was Prime Suspect). The harm to the movie was incessant. Hopcraft had moderned Esther Summerson by giving her some real characteristics of anger and resentment, and also pro-activity; nothing like that here, though unlike either previous Lucie at the film’s end Serena Gordon seems to realize she has done Carton in and at least looks some regret and memory of him.

This is actually the last close-up shot of the 1989 film: Lucie in the carriage

I expect the movie-producers were afraid of offending as this is a book that’s well known. I feel the book itself got in the way. OTOH, no more of this stigmatizing of the “mob” as in 1935 and 1958, more incidents were invented to make us understand the rage and fear of the people in charge of the terror, not a lot but something.

The 1958 and 1989 film were afraid of imitating the 1935 and this too got in the way. Bogarde did have a consistent fulfilling final moment: in accordance with his character, he is not eager to go, rather passively letting things happen than (as with Colman) reaching out (to the seamstress).

Bogarde as an apprehensive Carton

In 1989 we don’t see Wilby mount the scaffold, and the film ends with the carriage trundling away and the over-voice is the Christian “I am the Resurrection and the Light.” While that’s in the novel, it’s not the ending, and to put it last is to make Christian what is a part suicide scene: Carton seeking oblivion, peace, not redemption.

No one is redeemed in Dickens’s novel; it’s deeply pessimistic and as Colman mounts the scaffold (see the still prefacing this blog) we know the reason we do not hear catcalls is Miss Pross has murdered Madame Defarge. Jerry Cruncher, like Dickens’s Flintwich, beats his wife mercilessly, is the Resurrectionist of the book and bleakly parodies all the deaths. He conducts parody of the corpses of the ancien regime, and the corpses of the reign of (more intense because more crowded) few years to come. What is it Jay Gatsby says to Nick Carraway at the close of The Great Gatsby? “Tell me, old sport — what are we going to do with all these corpses on our hands?”

The ancien regime mutilated them. Jerry digs them up and sells them. Resurrectionist — a dark parody of I am the resurrection and the life, no? The US throws them out to sea.

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I know I’ve not written much since May 2nd (Disability Studies). I’ve been both busy and have lacked the heart to write much since My busyness has included finishing two powerful long novels by Trollope (He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now read alternatively) and then carrying on reading three more remarkable novels by Anthony Trollope, the last very long (Framley Parsonage, The American Senator, Phineas Redux). I’m doing some fascinating reading about the use of maps, about the presentation of the city through plot-designs and action which emerge from how space is mapped in these books and hope to write about this soon.

I return to Colman to say to equate him with the “old-fashioned silver-screen gentleman” is to underestimate him. He had gone to a boarding school and started a good education, but was forced to leave school at 16 when his father died suddenly; while working at an office job, he turned to dramatics as an amateur by the time he was 22. For 18th century lovers, he is said to have been able to trace his family tree directly back to George Colman. He fought in World War One, a Ypres, and was very badly wounded. He limped all his life afterward and part of his acting was to disguise this.

As the reporter waiting for his plan in Lost Horizon (this too is on one of my workroom walls)

Ellen

Maggie aka Margaret Thatcher: Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, but her legacy lives on

Listen and watch Tony Harrison’s filmed poem, V

‘My father still reads the dictionary every day./He says your life depends on your power to master words.’ — Arthur Scargill,
Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

V stands for Victory, Victim, Versus

Dear friends and readers,

She was a blight on us all — but unfortunately only an extreme version of the kind of people ruling most countries today. Like Reagan, she had a facility for saying something that seemed true, but was specious, that would be quoted and people would say “yes,” not realizing what she was endorsing was the worst and most rotten aspects of our experiences of life.

An important article by Andrew O’Hagan (“Maggie,” New York Review of Books, 60:9 [May 2013]:18-20). What O’Hagan does is show continually how in specific individual human terms Margaret Thatcher’s acts either destroyed some specific person’s hope, daily useful activity, job, opportunity or were responsible for killing literal people, destroying the houses or communities they lived in, e.g., the night she had the Belgrano sunk — outside the acknowledged waters of war (then there were limits to war’s purview) — 323 people died.

Maggie

It appears to be open to all, non-subscribers as well as paper and on-line subscribers, but lest you cannot reach it or do not feel inclined to click, some key paragraphs:

It was an impressive work of social engineering but ultimately a dreadful one. She created a population that is more dependent and less productive. She made us more individual but less cooperative. It must have looked heroic on paper or in the essays of Milton Friedman. But what she did was incredibly coarse in practice: she ground the unions down but left workers with no alternative form of self-esteem or protection, and the result, today, is a workforce of the alienated. She boasted of setting people free but British working people have never been more enslaved to the whims of fashion, corporate greed, and agism than they are now. A young person from a former mining community where there might have been classes in the evenings and a sense of propriety, decency, modesty, and community can now only hope for a place in “the zone”—the world of the “haves”—by winning a celebrity contest or by thriving on the black market …

All the kids in my class were given a small bottle of milk every day at mid-morning. It was nice to drink the milk, but nicer, in some larger way, to learn that you lived in a country where the government your parents paid their taxes to cared about you that minutely. Thatcher stopped the milk. It seemed new, the thought—promulgated by Keith Joseph, Norman Tebbit, and, chiefly, Margaret Thatcher—that people who didn’t want to strive and become better than their neighbors were totally lacking in spirit.

At first it seemed like a small philosophical problem: older people, hard-working people, contented people, sick people would argue that they didn’t have to be winners. They didn’t want to do better: they were quite happy to do fine. They liked being like other people. It squared with their sense of belonging and with their idea of what made British life stable. My mother worked in a youth club and Thatcher closed it down …

The summer before going to university I got a job with the Manpower Services Commission, at the Job Centre, working the front-line desk with the unemployed. It was 1986 and I’ll never forget those lines of men coming up to the desk to inquire about their suitability for work. There were no jobs. They could try for something in a bar or a hairdresser’s, but fifty-year-old men weren’t going to get those jobs and I was instructed not to send them for interviews. Norman Tebbit, one of Mrs. Thatcher’s proudest and crudest lieutenants, told them to “get on your bike and get a job.” And here they were, skilled tradesmen with thirty-five years’ experience, asking if I could put them forward for a job they weren’t going to get collecting glasses in a bar. Mrs. Thatcher came up with various schemes, such as Restart, where the unemployed would be called in and interrogated about what they were “actively” doing to seek work. And I was told to talk to each of the men about the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, by which the government would give them a grant to start up their own business. The notion that some people are simply not entrepreneurial was lost …

Most important for US readers:

She couldn’t hold the nation together, indeed she drove it apart, and that is because she didn’t really believe in the nation except as a sentimental or martial entity. That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who loved her and thought she was manifestly right, you find, after a while, that you are with people who don’t know their own country and don’t like it either. They think they like it because they don’t like Europe, but in fact, they abjure both. They like their own lives, of course, and their own kind, but they imagine the rest of Britain is mainly an unspeakable place of aliens and scroungers

When Romney and his ilk talk of the 47% they are saying that to them most of the US are scrounges and aliends. When the Republicans and their allies try to limit the vote, they are acting out of the conviction only a tiny percentage of people who live in the US are of their kind (well-to-do, white) and all the rest not quite human. Obama is an illegitimate president because his skin color is wrong.

Ellen

Disability studies — Victorian literature; women’s & present perspectives

Adam (Hugh Dancy in key role): a movie about an autistic young man

Dear friends and readers,

There’s a major area completely undiscovered – as it were — in Victorian literature. A way of making genuinely humane sense out of all sorts of works. We need to stop (first of all, a minimum first) stop using terms like “cripples” or “monstrous” as these feed into misunderstanding of what the experience of disability is to the person and those immediately around him or her, who live with and next to them.

To answer a request to cite a few such characters and comment on Victorian characters already cited:

The first shot of la Signora Neroni (Susan Hampshire): Mrs Proudie asks, “what’s so special about this lady beyond her preposterous name?” Rickman as Slope replies: “She can’t walk.”

Madame Neroni in Trollope’s Barchester Towers is not a monstrous figure, but her crippled state is described as grotesque. She refuses to try to walk is to do that would expose this aspect of her body. If we move away from the word “cripples” and an insistence on physical disability as the key to disability, Elizabeth Gaskell has quite a number of disabled characters across her oeuvre, especially the short stories (a number of which are gothic in feel). It’s mostly mental disability and she shows real empathy for the disabled character and her or his caretaker, mostly women. By contrast, there’s Eliot’s really cruel Lifted Veil where a “mentally retarded” young man (whom today would be labelled low-functioning autistic) is treated with horror, as an unendurable mischievously savage burden. I would count Tarchetti’s Fosca as an Italian Victorian gothic novella — in the modern translation by Lawrence Venuti it’s retitled Passion, the influence of Sondheim’s musical-opera.

It doesn’t take much to see many of the characters in gothic mysteries and crime stories as disabled people stigmatized as “other.” A reading of recent disability studies might open up a whole new area of humane investigation from this point of view, and this has been already begun. An issue of Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies — 6.2 (2012) — is dedicated to disability studies. The central point is made that disability is partly in the eye of the society who defines a series of traits as disability and then sees the person with these as “others”; then the purpose of the issue is to explore how disability is presented in literature. There are essays on “Late Victorian Gothic,” disability in romance, disability in crime and mystery novels.

The claim is persuasively made that crime and mystery novels have often centered on disabled people seen as villains, freaks, or the detective him or herself (mentally different you see). This kind of insight is fueling the new British Sherlock, arguably both Martin Freeman and Bernard Cumberbatch play high-functioning autistic or Aspergers characters who find deep friendship and a metier in helping other outside the cultural norm.

First shot of Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) home from war

Moving slightly away from Victorian texts, it’s argued in these essays that there are far more openly disabled characters in popular fiction than ever before, but the question is whether there has been really a development of understanding or empathy or it’s a reinforcing voyeurism in the service of enforcing normalcy. I know everyone is tired of hearing of Downton Abbey, but the presence of a character like Mr Bates is part of this new openness. What’s remarkable about Gaskell for example is by the end of her presentation the central characters have not been re-coopted into conventional patterns; they are not made “all well.”And to give Fellowes his due for once, Mr Bates is not co-opted back into “all well.” He remains outside the “norm” with his menacing dignity. The actor, Brendan Coyle, was given a central role in the film adaptation of Gaskell’s Cranford Chronicles.

I suggest a study of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights from the point of disability studies (her verse too) might open whole new points of view on Heathcliff and Emily Bronte herself, the occasional half-hysterical violence of that book, the apartness of her poetry and various stories about Emily herself. Isabella Linton Heathcliff may well be a portrait of a woman unable to cope with social demands, and reacting grotesquely.

There’s also Fictions of Affliction by Martha Stoddard Holmes: her figures in include Madame Neroni, Dickens’s Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend), Tiny Tim, Wilkie Collins’s Lucy Finch she also studies Henry Mayhew’s interviews with disabled street vendors; autobiographical writings of Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, both deaf; and biographies of two public figures who were blind, the postmaster general Henry Fawcett and the disabled-rights activist Elizabeth Gilbert.

Contemporary illustration of Dickens’s character by Marcus Stone

Holmes is said to be interested in the melodramatic way most of these figures are presented; it’s an emotional and moral, not a medical and social struggle. Thinking about this, for Madame Neroni I would say it is a social struggle. For example, her decision not to be seen walking, the way she re-interprets what happened during her marriage. She’s not presented melodamatically either. Not that I am arguing Trollope’s portrait is of a 20th or 21st century enlightened sort, but he does bring in that she was physically abused by her husband.

Though not on Victorian literature, the insights in Rosemarie Garland Thomson: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring disability in American literature may be used for Victorian literature.

Deafness is also often brought up as a central “type” of disability — partly because of the strong self-advocacy by the deaf, & I suggest Leonard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy ought to inform any work done in this area; its subtitle Disability, Deafness, and the Body brings out its central focus on deafness. One of the chapters is on the first recording and understanding of deafness as a disability (not a monstrous irreversible condition) in the 18th century; this revolutionary change began in our enlightenment and its work has never been wholly undone. Another chapter makes Quasimodo a central figure.

From Charles Laughton’s brilliant performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Going back in time a century, Oliver Sacks’s Seeing Voices also has a long eye-opening chapter on individual courageous and insightful 18th century philosophes who developed and taught sign language to deaf people, miraculously it was thought at first, turning them from imbeciles into functioning members of society — by those who would let them function. Sacks goes into the first schools for the dear, unfortunately all too quickly in the early 19th century an attempt was made to enforce talking on the deaf in such schools, to take away from them their sign language, to beat them into submission even. One of the most moving accounts of seeing the change in deaf people once they are treated as human beings like ourselves with another way of communicating is found at the close of Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands writes: if he that speaks looks towards them, and modifies his organs by distinct and full utterance, they know so well what is spoken, that it is an expression scarcely figurative to say, they hear with the eye … It was pleasing to see one of the most [hitherto] desperate of human calamaties capable of so much help.

I’ve not published any conventional articles on this for Victorian studies. It would take such work for me — partly because I’d have to really dig into Gaskell. She seems to me a rare spirit in the Victorian period to show sympathy, but to be accurate, her empathy is with the care-taking women. One limitation of her gothic stories is she tends to show sympathy simply for the care-taker and we see the disabled person as violent or sullen from afar; a rare instance of one of her attempts at a disabled perspecive is Lady Ludlow’s Story where the story is told by Margaret Dawson; however, soon after the narrative begins and not until we get near to the end are we reminded our narrator is a crippled girl on a couch.

I also dream of writing a study of the Poldark novels and Daphne DuMaurier’s King’s General. Placed in the 17th century civil war, the latter’s about a heroine crippled from a fall from a horse: DuMaurier said she began it when she saw near Menabillies (her great house) a home-made wooden wheel chair from the later 17th century in a barn.

This would take me back to the eighteenth century.

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Frida Kahlo, self-portrait with doctor

Thinking about Gaskell’s approach, disabilities affect women centrally as care-takers and as disabled. I’ve now gotten myself 3 books on disability studies in the humanities, two wholly devoted to how disabilities affect women, one of which I’ve begun: Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asche’s collection: Women with Disabilities. See Fine’s Disruptive Voices: Fine is the only person I’ve read to do justice to the class bias that ostracizes women who are raped when they come into clinics for help.A little from the introduction.

Because of the way society is structured, women experience disabilities much worse than men, and are much more ignored — the two go together, experienced much more excruciatingly in the area of sexual experience, so crucial to women’s lives. . I now have statistics and essays arguing what I’ve long felt to be so: the only reason it’s said more men are autistic is people care so much more about men not getting jobs or “doing well” socially; women need only be married off and have babies; plus people are more ashamed of reading women than reading men. A reading man might become a scientist, a professor, a lawyer, what is the use of a reading woman?

Why has there been little work done among feminists for women with disabilities? shamelessly, one female academic said: such studies would “reinforce traditional stereotypes of women in need, dependent, perhaps passive.” (Can’t have that.) I’ve just begun the essay in the volume on friendship between women one of whom has disabilities and the other not.

How few the conversations with people about disabilities and how even then when confronted with an individual there’s a turning away and intense discomfort, a desire not to have the burden, fear of contagion: you’ll catch it, you too will be ostracized. Disabled characters, open and disguised, are found among classic children’s books, more often than you might suppose.

One of Yvette’s favorite books: E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan: a mute swan carries a trumpet and writing slate

Two further well-known texts include Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza (made into a musical): the daughter is autistic. Lucy Greary’s Autobiography of a Face.

I’ve only begun Women with Disabilities but already the texts bring home to me aspects of a set of texts I’ve been studying for over two years now: Austen’s letters and the experience of discussing these with other people. Again and again I have to watch people continue to misread the emphases in these letters and ignore say Jane’s relationship with Martha Lloyd. Insist that she didn’t marry was a default option not a preference. Ignore the very real peculiarities in her character.

Recently I’ve added and compared Frances Burney D’Arblay’s life-writing and found some aspects of her compulsion to write come out of her disabilities as a child. But her life-writing is not as useful as Austen’s — she hides her disabilities since much is self-praising fictionalizing: she makes herself the central heroine of romances, the adulated, the envied, from George III’s madness to Hastings’ trial. It’s rather in her third novel, Camilla, where one of her two heroines, Eugenia, is lamed and her face disfigured early in the novel that we get an early rare example of empathy for a disabled woman in early literature: what happens to her: Eugenia ends up married to an abusive man.

For studying disability as such (not in literature) I’d much prefer to write about life-writings than novels

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How did I come to write the above? whom am I speaking to?

On the large academic literary listserv, Victoria, there had appeared a query where for a second time someone requested examples of “cripples” in a disquieting way. The person requested “gothic images of cripples” and used the word “monstrous” of such a character without any sense that she (or he) was treating a whole class of people as obvious freaks, taking aboard as it were what one would have hoped in such a place would be an outdated attitude.

I waited a while and when no response beyond that of listing such supposed characters emerged, which then morphed into citing “deaf” characters, I sent a posting which was at first rejected or over-looked as insufficiently Victorian. A little rewriting enabled it to go through the next day and then off-list I got a number of thank yous, remarks about how slow or small has been the progress of understanding of people with disabilities,and descriptions of experiences, that I decided to put the above posting on line to reach more people in the form of a continuation of a blog I wrote about a debate in articles in a humanities journal which covers popular literature as well as disabilities: is the increase in depiction of characters with disabilities creating real understanding or effective help for real people with disabilities? I asked how far fandoms prevent such growth in sympathy and how far authors and film-makers found themselves pressured into creating alienating depictions or enforcing normalcy.

And I discussed the dramatization of the experiences of characters with disabilities in the last 5 of the Poldark novels and Downton Abbey.

The third shot of Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle, the first two show his face in the window of a train arriving at Downton, !:1)

The first time a startlingly prejudiced posting was put on Victoria I answered it too excitedly, but if I could find that posting, I’d put here on this blog now too.

Ellen

Handel’s Giulio Cesare: Met HD-Opera style, post-modern Bollywood mash-up

David Daniels as Giulio Cesare

Dear friends and readers,

The Met ended its 2012-13 HD season with the superb Glynbourne production by David McVickers of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. From the inspired idea of setting the action in 19th century colonialist India loosely conceived: some of the outfits were 18th century and some contemporary 21st century (Dessay’s last dress and her slip-dress on the bed respectively), some mythic Renaissance (the triumphant close outfit of Daniels. The point was to evoke the colonialist world run by whites — none of Cesare or Cleopatra’s immediate servants were white. To the naturalistic acting and mostly exquisitely beautiful singing (exceptions were Daniels’ first aria, Achillas’s baritone which didn’t carry far though he looked right as the ruthless torment and would-be rapist of resistant Cornelia, Patrica Bardon.

Stand-out performance by Alice Coote as Sextus:

Christophe Dumaux as spiteful lascivious yet comic Tolomeo and (as ever) the actress-singer Dessay. Coote was subtle, fearful when she should be, shocked, comic. To the use of Indian style Bollywood gestures and dance steps, and orientalist comedy: Rachid Ben Abdeslam as the nervous servant Nirenus.

It all fit together. (See Cast, story, list of books.)

Part of the way the opera-makers broke the barriers of baroque formalized stylized acting and repetitive lines of song was also to insist on the staging, kinds of voices, motifs, attitudes, practices (and some of the costumes too) of the 18th century. A proscenium stage within the stage with columns up and down the side. Ships which cross the framed artificially flowing waters — such rich colors.

I noticed it’s called a Bollywood Giulio Cesare — it’s not; it’s eclectic, taking what it wanted from repertoire of genre cliches to achieve comedy: it sort of made fun of Handel’s opera. Here are Cesare and Cleopatra as a 1920s competitive couple:

Here they are all sexuality until a frantic revolutions turn the scene into slap-stick comedy:

Cesaer (David Daniels) and Cleopatra (Natalie Dessay)

Sometimes Dessay danced a Charleston (all gay innocence):

and sometimes Dumaux was a silly vain Brit in a tennis-outfit and then again a transvestite in drag:

At the same time it took the story seriously — especially distressing to watch was Achillas’s (Guido Loconsolo) humiliation and suggestive torture (brought in everywhere in contemporary art) of Cornelia:

Achillas

The self-conscious variety reminded me of last year’s pastiche Enchanted Island as fantasy mash-up. I’d call this post-modern mash-up. Nonetheless, my favorite moments were the serious ones. I found touching Cornelia’s relationship with her clinging clumsy son, Sesto. I loved the more melancholy arias, like Dessay’s haunting “Piangero, la sorte mia:”

This opera reminded me of how important the costumes (here by Brigitte Reiffenstuel) and masque-like nature of the genre is.

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These past four years have provided me with my real first experiences of actually going to a full season of opera at a given opera-house. I don’t know that I have a sense of a general theme or feel or outlook for a season at the Met. Izzy suggested this year Diva’s predominated. A few got to choose an opera that would be done. Eva-Marie Westbook brought back Francesca di Rimini. The great ones made the opera, like Joyce Didonato as Maria Stuarda. But the Met seems to me to have no perspective but that of strong entertainment, piquant and original productions which do not offend the audience. Pleasure, interest-arousing variety and bringing in money and a larger audience are key here. That’s why the celebrity Broadway-like productions.

I find all the more grating (and condescending) the insistence each time of said hostess (or host) that the experience of “live-opera” in the house is so much superior to that of the person in the far-off theater. I wonder if they believe that? They must say it: how else how justify huge prices? The Met management fears their live audience members will revert to movie-going. Doubtless some people have. That means big loss of revenue for their donors come from their live audience members.

Joyce DiDonato — close up from Maria Stuarda

While I do not underestimate the visceral effect of live performances, for myself seeing operas in HD-format genuinely competes with seeing and hearing them live. For each opera I’ve been able to understand what’s going on for the first time, to really see the action and acting close enough to be affected by it. I’ve not fallen asleep as yet, and I still fall asleep every once in a while when Jim takes me to a live opera even when we are not sitting too far off. Despite the irritating hype and inanity of some of the interview talk, I enjoy and learn something from watching the stage crews set up the stage between acts and the “hostess’s” talks with costume and other tech people and even the occasional honest intelligent singer. That’s part of what I value of the experience. And yes I like the informality of the audience, the lack of false showing-off.

I now have favorite singer-actors. I recognize less well-known superbly-talented people. I begin to have knowledge of the repertoire.

From Susan Herbert’s Opera Cats: gentle reader, can you guess which opera is alluded to here? (answer in comments)

The experience lifts the year so that next year I’m again wanting to go to almost all the productions. Saturday dinner Izzy, Jim and I have good talk about the opera. $20 each for admission.

Ellen

For Anthony Trollope’s Birthday

A photograph of him around age 40, completely unglamorized; it’s not often reprinted

Friend and readers,

Anthony Trollope was born April 24, 1815.

Two tributes also not often reprinted, and a brief comment by Proust which sums up what Margaret Oliphant implied in her (also not sufficiently consulted, but too long to quote here) 4+ page review of Trollope’s An Autobiography (reprinted in Trollope: Interviews & Recollections, ed. R.C. Terry, from which the two passages below also come):

What did he look like:

His outward appearance symbolises, or rather pictures, his inner. When you look at his face, you exclaim, with Addison’s Cato, ‘Plato, thou reasonest well.’ For, as that great one said, the soul chooses a fit house wherein to dwell, you must own that the soul of Trollope has fitted itself with a proper and suggestive tabernacle. His portrait is gaunt, grim, partly grey and looks taller than he is; his eyes are noticeable, dark and brilliant; two strong lines down each side of his mouth, lost in a tufted American-like beard, give him a look of greater ill-nature than he possesses. He is unquestionably a gentleman, but of the middle-class look, by no means of haut école. He gives one an idea — that is, if one knows life and town pretty well — that he has seen hard service in the drudgery of some government office; he has cut-and-dried official look, and seems capable of scolding and otherwise irritating his juniors. He looks his age – about fifty-five – and is a man one would hardly choose to confide in …
     – Douglas Jerrold, The Housekeeper, on whom see Spartacus Educational, and wikipedia, his son Blanchard Jerrold’s great picture book is London: A Pilgrimage, illustrated by Gustave Doré

How did his inward personality strike people in his presence:

Nobody could see anything of him without feeling that he was in the presence of an exceptionally high-minded as well as an exceptionally gifted man, a man of strong feelings as of strong sense, but a man who well knew how to keep his feelings in check, and a man whose practice as well as his theory was Christian. He told me once a story — and the story was pathetic enough as he told it with all its details — of a certain work of his having been claimed by someone else, and of the inevitable exposure which followed the claim; and his own feeling was of pity for the claimant. This, told without the impression which his own manner of telling it conveyed, seems a trifling thing by which to illustrate the noble qualities of a man who was great in more than one sense; but the absolute simplicity of it, the complete incapacity to imagine that anyone telling such a story could tell it with any other feeling, made an enduring impression on me; and it seemed to me strange to reflect that had he for purposes of fiction had to describe a man with a particle of meanness in him, telling such a story, he would have brought out the meanness in the most easy and most lifelike way. What he would have seized on with quick instinct as a novelist was out of his ken as a man.
      Something has been said as to the wide grasp of Mr Trollope’s powers and intellect, and this applied to what his mind took in as well as to what it gave out. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a well-read man, and he used always to read for a given time in the early morning, before sitting down to his task of composition …
      — Walter Herries Pollock, From “Anthony Trollope,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 66 (May 1883) — Trollope’s neighbor in Montagu Square

Proust (Contre Saint-Beuve)

qu’un livre est le produit d’un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la societe, dans nos vices . . . [The man who appears in conversation and drawing-room essays is ... not] le moi qui a attendu pendant qu’ on etait avec les autres, qu’ on sent bien le seul reel, et pour lequel seuls les artistes finis sent par vivre’. [A book is the product of another self than the one we show in our habits, in society, in our vices .... the self who waits while one is with others, whom one feels is the sole real I, for whom in the end artists live, my translation]

John Everett Millais, “Judge Staveley and His Daughter, for Orley Farm

Trollope said he loved Millais as a man, he certainly loved many of Millais’s illustrations to his novels, he had the whole set for Orley Farm which, it’s said, he looked at many times. This one, my favorite of the series, is a typical one of depiction of imminent loss retrieved.

About another (of Lady Mason, the heroine) he said as narrator of Orley Farm (that is, inside the novel):

In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room — that pleasant room, looking out through the verandah on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned upon her elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength, — more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her.

Ellen just now rereading The American Senator

Trollope archive

Trollope’s Latin reading & books: Apollo in Barsetshire for college students

Here he was wont to sit and read his Horace, and think of the affairs of the world as Horace depicted them. Many a morsel of wisdom he ahd here made his own, and had then endeavoured to think whether the wisdom had in truth been taken home by the poet to his own bosom, or had only been a glitter of the intellect — Mr Whittlestaff, Trollope’s An Old Man’s Love

The words of Mercury are harsh, after the songs of Apollo, Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act 5, scene 2

Grace Crawley proves who or what she is by her reading: G. H. Thomas, “They pronounced her to be very much like a lady”, The Last Chronicle of Barset

Dear friends and readers,

A thread emerged on the Trollope facebook page this morning as important for understanding Trollope as his years in the post office; lack of understanding of the sources of feminism, many widows, interest in debt and suicide, not to omit maps and televisuality: his knowledge of classical stories, people, history, and late love of Latin.

A man on the facebook Trollope page, someone I’m friends with on facebook proper, so to speak (there are different facebook places nowadays), a fellow Renaissance person (loves the poetr too), Graham Christian, told everyone about the Trollope Apollo project: a college teacher had her students read Trollope’s Barsetshire novels looking for classical references and allusions with an eye to writing about how they were used on a website they would create. They found many many. The Barsetshire books are laden with these references, often used comically — if rather externally, e.g., the political satire in Framley Parsonage where the Whigs are the gods, and the Tories the giants. The students had to read these superb books; they had to understand how these allusions were used; they had to work on a website. An incidental effect of all this activity might be they would discover how the materials of Latin classic texts can be relevant to us today.

I’ve known about Trollope’s Apollo since 2006 when she contacted me to ask if I could link the project into my website; I was delighted to do so in several places, and when the thread morphed to ask (among other things) if learning Latin is relevant to useful, I found myself contributing again and again. I found myself agreeing that arguing that we must study X [Latin] because it helps us better understand Y [French] — other such arguments won’t encourage more respect. You have to show students that studying Latin for itself and reading what’s written in Latin is good to do for its own sake — meaningful, fun, absorbing. Like Virgil’s Aeneid is splendid, moving and an anti-war
war poem. Probably the college students are not advanced enough to read the equivalent Latin text to a Trollope novel.

Nonetheless, the teacher seemed to me just the sort of teacher we should have more of. I admired her. And her students’ efforts are touching. At a minimum, now if you want to find a classical allusion in Trollope’s Barsetshire books, now you can. And Apollo is the god of reason, a quality we see too little of in our public media or the public world.

Then someone remembered that Trollope had said the 12 years of his time in school included astonishing wastes of time — as Latin and Greek were so poorly taught as not to have been taught at least to him at all. She said these schools were generally really bad. Trollope’s statement about himself has been shown to be an exaggeration (by who else but R. H. Super? — he loves to rewrite Trollope’s sense of his life), but it is true that Trollope’s knowledge of the language, understanding of classical history and mature use of this material came much later in life. There’s an excellent article on this, which Glenn Shipway cited: Robert Tracy’s “Lana Medicata Fuco: Trollope’s Classicism” (in Trollope: Centenary Essays, ed. John Halperin). I reread it this evening, and hence am putting what I wrote this morning on facebook somewhat altered in the light of what Tracy reminded me of.

It’s so easy to come across horror stories about public school life for boys in the 19th and early 20th century, it’s probably true it was a bad place for many kinds of boys — especially in the areas of the inculcation of bullying, the lack of decent food and accommodations, the wretched way many of the tutors (underpaid, despised) taught. Trollope says his brother literally whipped him and Tom did not deny that. Thackeray is rare truthful person who as an adult conceded the vicious sexual goings-on — I’m not referring to homosexual patterns per se, but the way these were done in an environment which defined them as sinful and ugly. A great novel revealing this is Simon Raven’s Fielding Grey (Raven wrote the scripts for The Pallisers and the first, now wiped out, The Way We Live Now [1969]). As a boy Trollope was accused of some kind of homosexual behavior (or perhaps masterbation) in one school (Sunbury) and the boys who had done it knew he had not, and let him take the rap. He says as of the time of writing he remembers their names.

In one of his books Thackeray writes of wanting to expose all these realities and the indifference to all this of the parents who send boys to such schools — as they knew about it: what they care about is the boy comes into contact with boys of wealthy, well-connected people and makes friendships that could lead to good jobs in later life. (Today people will go into heavy debt to go to schools with such people in them.)

Laurence Alma Tadema, Reading Homer

All that said, studies show some boys survived these schools without too much apparent damage and many even did learn to love and read the classics, if not in Latin, in English translation, though sometimes it includes Greek, e.g., Richard Jenkyns’s The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Some went home almost immediately. It depends on the child or young adult. There are many Victorian studies of the influence of the classics on writers and art in that age. Many of the great English poets show this background from Johnson and Thomas Grey to the Edwardians and there’s a whole Latin literature which at least some people read. You can reach it through English translation.

As a genuinely intelligent imaginative young man when Trollope overcame his depression (in Ireland) and slowly worked his way into a social and professional success, he could and did find it in himself in his late years, to turn back, re-teach or teach himself for the first time how to read Latin well and make such texts a source of happiness to himself. While he partly laughs gently at Mr Whittlestaff, he is Mr Whittlestaff. Early on in his writing career, he wrote and published a learned review critiquing his friend Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire. After he improved his proficiency (or in improving it) he became fascinated by Caesar, admired the Commentaries and wrote a book on it which he defends in his Autobiography as “a good little book,” readable, one which could inform all people, “old and young,” about Caesar. An early admiration gave way to a sense of the terrible harm such a “great man” can inflict on his society, and he preferred Cicero, the thoughtful friend, and his letters and wrote a portrait of Cicero as a political study (rather like his Palmerston). He was very hurt at the condescending sneers his book attracted from classical scholars. From the references of his early books to classical characters and stories, to having his characters read and enjoy classics, Trollope points out analogies between the ancient world and his own. Tracy says Trollope projected his own character traits onto Cicero and imagines Cicero intensely enjoying London social life in the 19th century.

From the 1974 BBC Pallisers: Alice (Caroline Mortimer) reading

For myself I like the more thoughtful worked out allusions to classical themes and people of his later books, and it often charms me to read of characters in books loving this or that author. I like to remember John Grey sitting down to read of the French revolution and Alice Vavasour calming herself with Carlyle (!). The ironies of the way Josiah Crawley uses his knowledge of English & Latin classics to buoy up his shattered pride and the witty dialogues between say Plantagenet Palliser and his sons are amusing and touching. Tracy says when Palliser tells his sons “Money ought to have no power of conferring happiness, and certainly cannot drive away sorrow,” he then misquotes a Horatian text in a way that undermines what he said, that Melmotte is Trollope’s late idea of a Caesar type.

One of the Trollope Society yearly lectures (printed in a Trollopiana) is about a less pleasant or admirable side to Trollope’s use of Latin and the classics. To quote a Latin tag or line is to demonstrate you are upper class, went to a public school or had a tutor in Latin. By using Latin, Trollope identifies himself as a gentlemen with other gentlemen. This by implication excludes those who haven’t Latin or haven’t read these books even in translation. It excludes women for the most part too. We can see this use of Latin in the George Housman illustration at the beginning of this blog. Grace Crawley proves her status as gentlewoman by the way she reads and what she reads. That which is used to signify belonging is also used to stigmatize, make coteries. I can’t remember the name of the author of the Trollopiana article, only that it was a London Society lecture and written in deconstructionist jargon; I cannot think it went over very well …

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Mandelbaum’s translation of Aeneid with original cover

Fast forward to today where the evils of institutionalized bullying and ugly attitudes towards sex are mostly gone (not all), and you can find people who learned to love Latin or profited from it. My personal interest in this area comes in here. My husband loathed his public school; he went there as a day boy and wore a different colored uniform to show he was poor; he was caned 5 times, once for making his “f’s” perversely. A searing memory is how as an 11 year old he and others were made to stand in the pouring rain holding up a salute as some politicians whizzed by in their limousine. But until today he really enjoys and knows about the classical world, reads about it, gets a kick out of jokes and works which burlesque it. He has a lovely polished prose style from his years in public school.

Last night I read aloud a long funny passage from Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy where the central characters put on a play, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, itself a savage bitter satire on the Trojan characters. The characters each take such pride in playing a particular famous character, and the ones chosen highlight their absurdities as well as the way they are experiencing WW2. Jim laughed and laughed.

My younger daughter, Isobel, loves Latin itself, minored in it in college, could be a Latin teacher if there were positions and she were trained. A friend who has a blog (mirabile dictu she calls it) loves Latin – she majored in college and has written about the Aeneid. Izzy loves Horace and Catullus in the original; she much enjoyed studying Latin history in post-graduate courses at GMU for a couple of years.

My favorite story is of my older daughter, Laura, who took Latin for two years in high school and again preferred it in college to satisfy the then language requirement in college. She was very popular during lunch because she clung to an priceless irreplaceable book we have in our house: a copy of the Aeneid in Latin with an English translation placed in-between the lines in such a way as to unravel (so to speak) the order of the Latin so that it resembles the ordering of English words in sentences. It’s an interlinear Vergil by Hart and Osborne. Laura never let this book out of her sight while others used it.

An example of an interlinear translation text

I’m one of those people who after a couple of years of college Latin could stumble through an advanced exam in medieval Latin (the “that” clauses are all set up in the English manner) like one does a puzzle. I like some Latin very much in translation. I love the Aeneid as translated by Allen Mandelbaum and the Georgics by C. Day Lewis. I really enjoy Pope’s Horatian poems — though I’m told that they are far more Juvenalian than Horatian.

From yon old walnut-tree, a show’r shall fall;
And grapes, long-lingring on my only wall,
And figs, from standard and espalier join:
The dev’l is in you if you cannot dine.
Then chearful healths (your Mistress shall have place)
And, what’s more rare, a Poet shall say Grace.
Fortune not much of humbling me can boast;
Tho’ double tax’d, how little have I lost?
My life’s amusements have been just the same,
Before, and after Standing Armies came.
– 2nd Satire of 2nd Book, Horace “paraphrased by Pope

Ellen