Charles Dickens and Sandy Welch’s Our Mutual Friend: A book of a river

Filmic rendition in Welch’s movie of the famous opening scenes of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: opening shot of movie; Lizzie (Keeley Hawes) at center; John Harmon (Steven Mackintosh) back from the dead and drowned the last

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past 10 weeks I’ve been listening to Mil Nicolson (Librivox) read aloud Dickens’s last complete great novel, Our Mutual Friend while in my car. Alas, I didn’t get very far: I was hardly in my car after the 1st week of December, and I was that awkward with the thumbnail drive and the ipod, I kept re-listening to what I had heard. I managed to get near Chapter 20. At the same time though I did read a number of essays on Dickens’s novel and found myself remembering my first reading of the novel while I was in my thirties, when I reached the point of the strained marriage
of Bella Wilfhur and John Rokesmith and Dickens’s presentation of Rokesmith’s way of educating Bella out of her materialism and prestige-oriented values. It seemed to me a reverse of Ibsen’s The Doll House: he was tyrant and she obdurate pupil. I was pulled along by the ferocious rivalry of Headstone (his deep injuried) and the nihilism, arrogance of that expert needle artist, Eugene Wrayburn. Finally the abject Lizzie despised at some level by both and all but Jenny Wren, her loving self-annhiliation.

So I sought quick entry into the novel by way of Sandy Welch’s masterpiece film, a transposition (faithful), Our Mutual Friend. And I found I got closer to the book than I might have done in the text had I been able to read at night. (I no longer can most of the time.) Welch is (as she often is) faithful to the plot-design, keeps all major characters (and invents no new ones), keeps all the hinge points (central plot turning points), famous lines (well what there is of fame). She respects Dickens — and her audience. I just loved this film and writ here about it to suggest it is a deeply humane way reading of the novel and present another case for the greatness of costume drama and mini-series.

Welch’s film is deeply melancholy, sad and opens where Dickens’s does: the river. I remember OMF as being highly unusual for Dickens for its central exploration of sexuality twisted and gone wrong and the conflict of Headstone and Wrayburn, but this far in the book (Chapter 8) the idea that what is driving the world into sickness is not that everyone is longing to love one another and be loved — which is Welch’s particular emphasis.

Dickens’s book had stayed with me: I still remembered the opening on the river between Liz and her bird of prey father after all these years. The 2nd chapter of the Veneerings is generalized out to depict the dysfunctional — unreal, utterly insincere lying — basis of social life and the goals of those who practice dinners. The 3rd chapter gives us some understanding of what we saw in Chapter 1, and we meet Eugene (a do nothing, this type embitters Dickens so, only here we are allowed to see how hard it is to do something and how it’s all wrapped up in money and performance) and then 4th, Lizzie who can’t read because it would offend her father and she can only hope “to influence” if she gives up her inner life.

Dark and bitter and lost. I miss the use of the narrators in Bleak House (Esther Summerson versus the saturnine voice) and the use of 3rd person free indirect discourse in Little Dorrit. We are at such a distance from these figures we listen to and see thus far.

Welch’s film worked for me as all was presented as deep grief from Lizzie’s horrified bewildered point of view. The settings were most of them of narrow spaces, no room to turn, dark too, scary as allowing people to come up behind you and destroy you. Or abject public spaces.

It’s a world based on the river. Everyone gets their living off the river and around it. Even dredging up corpses. People throw themselves into the river or are thrown there.

It’s a world of garbage dumps. Of people making their living scavenging. The Boffins for years have run a huge garbage dump.

Mr Boffin (Peter Vaughn) showing Mr Rokesmith (Steven Mackintosh’s second disguise, now hired as Boffin’s secretary) his house and environs

In the film after the river scene and the party salon choral scene:

Lady Tippins (Margaret Tyzack) in the center

we cut to the scene in the public tavern which comes out of the river: In both book and film we encounter the hard indifference of behavior Miss Abbey Potterson (Linda Bassett in the film) could enact before Lizzie Hexam when Lizzie refuses to separate herself form her father, disliked by Miss Potterson as much for his low status and what people therefore think of his possible horrible crimes as these crimes themselves: he seems to kill poor people, throw them in the river and then retrieves them for money.

Dickens’s descripion of The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, like the use of caricature and abstraction, brings us right back to early Dickens. apparently there was such a pub; here is a later illustration by Sol Eytinge (From Victorian Web)

The house is alive, it’s a person or character in itself, a world built of meanings reflecting its significance in its surrounding by its physical characteristics. Stone had not illustrated it.

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Part Two of the film veered off to Welch’s emphasis. She presented the characters are intensely eager to reach one another, to love, to be interdependent. Three love affairs in Dickens which I remember as fiercely devouring, finally selfish, are here presented under the aegis of intense need and hurt. Eugene Wrayburn intensely needs Lizzie to give his life a meaning and him meaningful action (to teach her and Jenny to read). David Morrissey delivers a brilliant performance as a half-mad anguished Bradley Headstone, intensely sexually repressed and hating anyone who is not (especially women): he wants to take over Lizzie to prove his self-worth and loathes Wrayburn for dismissing him, laughing at him.

Headstone (David Morrissey) in his school

Wrayburn stands for the world. It’s hard to see if he has any concern for Lizzie (Wrayburn seems to) but the performance is sympathetic. At least I think so.

Paul McGann as the louche drone who is finally reclaimed

The third affair shows us Rokesmith falling in love with Bella whose kindness to her father is made much of. He takes the father out to dinner, and shows him respect. They have a beautiful day doing things like going to a museum, dressing up, courtesy interchanges; she has bought the father a new outfit all at once (Dickens makes the point that this man never before had a new hat and trousers at the same time). He loves her and she is beginning to see the man who is hovering over her with the same intensities as Headstone and Wrayburn has a heart.

Father-daughter, Mr Wilfur (Peter Wight) and Bella (Anna Friel)

John and Bella

The movie is filled with shots of people hugging one another. Jenny Wren imagines herself being beaten and beating others, but she is all loving kindness to Lizzie whom she has taken in as a seamstress and she needs Lizzie as much as Lizzie needs her.

Lizzie and Jenny Wren (Katy Murphy) hugging together

Thus far the Boffins are loving; even Wegg is respectful, enjoying his cake while reading The Decline.

Regret, anger, grief, alienation from one another: the Lammles (Anthony Calf and Doon Madkichan shortly after marriage

Against this the Lammles are obviously a sick couple, full of hatred because they have married perversely; Lizzie’s brother does stand out as inexplicable in character compared to the others. He throws Lizzie off for not accepting Headstone: he seeks status as well as money, We do wonder why? There seems no reason to — the day out of Bella and her father is not at all connected to having status and money; it seems one can pull this off as long as one has a heart. The Lammles have one only for themselves.

Marcus Stone’s illustration

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Lizzie’s brother, Charles (Paul Bailey), sent to school

A crucial moment in the book. Chapter 6, the scene where Lizzie comes home and tells her brother he must leave them to go to school full-time and stay away, and then the profoundly affecting/affective scene of Lizzie telling her father, his sudden (to me) unexpected murderous rage, taking his knife and stabbing the table, saying that if his son rejected him, he rejected the son totally and would smash (or some other word) that son, and Lizzie’s abject cringing horror.

The pictorialism of the scene remains in the mind: the outline of the girl cringing in horror more than terror for herself, the old man again a bird of prey at that table.

I took it that Lizzie is not afraid of her father, but we are to understand that though she insists to herself her father does not murder people, throw them in the river and then retrieve them to sell as corpses, at some level (not very deep) she believes it. And it could be he does.

At any rate she wants to separate her brother from him more to keep the brother from the moral contamination than even the shunning of the father that has begun as Rumor becomes explicit. She refuses to protect herself either from social isolation and pariah-dom and refuses to learn to read well and to teach herself because this would arouse the father’s jealousy and hatred and she no longer be able to influence him.

The complete self-sacrifice of this position is intolerable and the contradictions not improbable. If a girl were so electrified with moral horror, she’d not stay; if she had this kind of intelligence, how could she (like a Radcliffe heroine) refuse to acknowledge wrong-doing even to herself; if she refused to believe it, she’d probably be narrow, obtuse, filled with the usual family loyalty that is a species of hypocrisy (so I see it) and clan protection. By doing this Dickens does make such a scene. I would not call her an angel since her behavior is as morally imbecilic as the Radcliffe heroine of Udolpho faced with terror and refusing to run away because forsooth she has to be obedient to her aunt, some piety.

The brother is such a weasel and now I’m remembering this way he and we meet Bradley Headstone (whose second name refers to death, the graveyard, he’s a headstone, and also his great bodily strength — made of stone, his obtuseness). And that is the way Welch has the boy actor do the part in the film.

We see the breakup of families and how it happens and real internecine feeling.

The shunning by Gaffer by crowd or group mentality against his “pollution” as well as self-protection.

This is a novel and film for this decade — not thus far as to analysis of institutions but the way people are just turned into hideous poverty. I was watching DemocracyNow.Org last night and film of the Syrian people, desperately poor, being shot in the streets by their gov’t's military forces, their home hovels. They have no access to the great wealth of their own country, it’s kept to the few, in this case including not only the elite of their country running it (1% indeed) but the US which gives millions to support that elite (ditto in Yemen, ditto Bahrain). And we need not go so far: the Tories are busy doing this all over England (impoverishing people, destroying jobs, social services, social institutions for public meeting) and the US gov’t here (billions for drones for surveillance, no money for people foreclosed or the least job).

The real trouble with the book is the picture is not attached to anything the way I have just attached it. Welch I think achieves this with her larger landscape pictures and use of choral commentaries (ironic, bitter) in the rich people salon and party scenes.

Did Dickens expect his readers to understand? or simply have an urge to rouse them against the conditions of their time? the problem is the readership is not Gaffer and Lizzie — they are not real people at any rate. I remember how Madame de Stael said the problem with writing novels is you have to appeal to readerships which don’t understand, will get offended, and get past conscious censorship too.

It appeals through inarticulated pictures and a dependence on the reader having the moral reaction which is comprehensive but the readers often do not For example, readers online complain of Stone’s illustrations as ugly or weird or not pleasing. They are spot on — and a product of collaboration between Dickens and Stone. I’ve put a few of them into our albums.

Mr Wegg wants some of his body parts back; Mr Venus (Timothy Spall) charges

Mr Venus’s shop in the pictures scarcely captures the morbidity of the bodies. They are done in both the caricature and idyllic style. Headstone writhing on the floor is the latter:

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Peter Vaughn as Mr Boffin asking Wregg to become his reader

Crazed madness of Wregg (Kenneth Cranham) before Boffin’s new mansion

The dwarf is a disabled figure who turns up as an evil grotesque in Dickens — and again it’s bodily and again dwarves are often shown to be twisted people where they are blamed for having poison in them, not that their emotional state is a reaction to how they’ve been treated, which is much more the reality. A powerful black singer (Eric Owen) turned the anti-semitic portrait of a dwarf in Wagner’s Ring into a figure that resonated with justified resentment in a recent Met HD production, and the stance seems to have resonated in many heart and ear. I have never read The Old Curiosity Shop. I can’t think of any dwarves this morning. We have to try to remember disfigured characters perhaps to find an equivalent in realistic fiction.

I remember feeling for Jenny Wren who takes Lizzie in. I understood how she could come to love-hate her clinging devouring father.

Dickens’s Mr Boffin seems to me a male type that has disappeared. Literary types do disappear when whatever social reality that gave rise to them goes. He’s the male simpleton, usually or almost always working class. Such men were used in the Shirley Temple movies. I suggest they come from the strong culture of deference which at once deprived most males of higher education and taught them they would be punished hard if they did not appear happy and complacent and even ignorant of the terms of their lot. The type may be seen (paradoxically perhaps but neutralizing the archetype) in Walt Disney’s Snow White’s 7 dwarves. Dickens does improve this by suggesting Mr Boffin is socially insecure, sensitive, avoiding class hurts. Why else go to Silas Wegg? Mr Boffin feels he’s least likely to be despised, and his tiny sums of money appreciated. So there’s a little insight …

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Lizzie as Madonna saving the beaten Wrayburn

In Sandy Welch’s film, we have the uncommon case of a male novel turned into a woman’s film — for all the characteristics of women’s films are here, plus distinguishing elements of Welch’s art. Among these both are this peculiar emphasis on the large landscape as a scene of intimacy. We have one here: in the story Eugene Wrayburn as been in effect stalking Lizzie, trying to get her to come live with him outside marriage. He does it tenderly as if he cannot resist and needs her, but he will not marry her as beneath him. She our ideal woman of course knows it’s unthinkable for him to marry her so flees him, but does stubbornly hold out when he finds her out through bribing Jenny Wren’s father — Lizzie has been working as a seamstress for Jenny who took her in when her father died.

But his stalking her is just one stalking; he is stalked in turn, by Bradley Headstone who tells himself his intentions are all honorable. He wants to marry her. That means in reality crush her spirit utterly. He despises her as he daughter of the lowest of the low, a grave snatcher, perhaps a murderer, who drew bodies from the filth of the Thames. He would control and bend her to his will, with an iron mind. This is honor? This is marriage Victorian style yes. Bradley stalks Lizzie too but he also stalks Eugene who drives him mad by his mockery. Wrayburn won’t acknowledge Headstone is there and gets a thrill out of this stalking.

Wrayburn is a sick man, as sick as so many of the people in this novel are.

Unfortunately Welch softens Wrayburn as many do. What she does do — is make the film about people reaching out to one another, prevented from succeeding by the norms of the private property system, prestige, social performance. The madness of dysfunctional behavior if we were to consider what might make good people happy is pictured for us repeatedly in the landscapes. There are astonishing moments of a crippled man named Wegg dancing in the screen against garbage dumps, against rich houses. Most of the scenes are of garbage dumps, broken down places. Others are of the river, wet, stodgy, dangerous, glittering. Some are the corridors of the city, pictured as narrow labyrinth prisons (like a Renaissance painting). Only nature has beauty. Only there are people together intimately because away from the social group.

The colors are so rich. The film much reminds me of her Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, North and South in this use of landscape. Here, for example, is Lizzie reversing what her father did. Her father drew dead bodies from the river which he perhaps killed, and he sold them to doctors or anyone who would take them Ah ha another parallel for today: the animal torture business, people kidnap and enslave animals for experiments and if you protest for real, you can be imprisoned as an eco-terrorist. It also shows the ruthlessness of the medical industry then too.

She is going to save Eugene Wrayburn. She has found him smashed up on the wet grasslands (!?) just outside London, done in by Headstone who he Wrayburn did egg on to this.

It’s deeply felt and the book provides the depth behind the vignettes, each story fully played out with details and thought. I loved the music too, slow, rhythmic like a swaying boat in a river.

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In the feature Pam Ferris likened Mrs Boffin to a working class woman today who wins the lottery; she is better than that for she has a very good heart, and unlike Mr Boffin is never corrupted into even seeming mean
Some contemporary analogues and characters in other novels by Dickens:

Some of the description of Mr Podsnap (hardly there at all in the film) put me in mind of Newt Gringich, lines about his solid sliminess (words to this effect). He is not the lout the American politician is. Otherwise his narrow hypocrisy and obnoxiousness is probably an accurate rendition of a Victorian type still partly with us.

Miss Podsnap (not in the film) reminded me of Flora in Little Dorrit: made nervous and unsure of herself by never having been allowed to live or have any independence. I wonder if this type is found elsewhere in Dickens. If she reflects Dickens’s wife’s character, then considering he understood that, his leaving her feels worse. OTOH, I was not sure in either Flora or this Georgiana’s case I’m not reading sympathy into the character rather than derision.

IN the book, Riderhood comes to snitch on Hexam in order to get the award and both Lightwood and Wrayburn return to the Hexam residence. The picture of Lizzie weeping by the fire, her loneliness, her desperate circumstances is moving. She is this still picture of abjection and loss. We are not allowed to see inside her hardly at all in this book.

Rokesmith and the Wilburs are brought in very late: almost an afterthought, something that came to Dickens later. Yet a central group. By contrast, in the film adaptation the supposed murder of Harman comes first, and the character of Harmon to Rokesmith brought in very early. I’ve put a still of Steven Mackintosh talking to Bella after they are married on our website page. He’s a brilliant actor and really best at fierceness, anger and I think has just the right amount of intense sternness towards Bella for the part Dickens meant. I just wish his bitterness had been directed elsewhere or Bella had not been made into this shallow type; Welch changes that a lot, and makes Bella have a warm good heart which very quickly learns to be better once she leaves the Wilbur mother (a misogynist bully figure to my mind).

The surroundings are so oozy and ugly and eerie in the book, but then London was not nice place for most people and Wrayburn’s words about the desperate street life he saw Paris (people picking up garbage to make ends meet) probably I assume reflects what Dickens saw and wants us to realize are the real cities too.

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As I watched the first hour or so of the fourth and last part (thus half of it) of Sandy Welch’s OMF, it set me thinking more about Dickens’s OMF. The last part of Welch’s OMF moves very slowly: we have a longish sequence of each of our sets of characters waking: everyone getting up to face the day and what they see: Mortimer Lightwood gets up and Eugene not there; we see the desperate houses by the water, Jenny out anxious and deeply resentful but worried about her father; Wegg vowing vengeance — and we see the misery of the workers at the garbage dump (especially symbolic this); Bella looking at John in bed; Mrs Noddy sad in her splendid loneliness; the Lammles smoking nearby as they prepared to enter to offer themselves as replacements for the real friends the Noddys had (the crippled disabled boy is gone as well as Bella): Mr Riderhood finding Headstone bloodied in the grass near his house. Again when a series of climactic events where Mortimer discovers Wrayburn near death with Lizzie; Jenny’s father dredged up from river where he drowned; John outted as John Harmon finally, the Lammles refused, Headstone back in the school where LIzzie’s vicious brother now says he will have nothing to do with Headstone we get another such sequence.

One does not have time for this in the recent (by Andrew Davies) Bleak House and Little Dorrit films, or most Dickens films I’ve seen. Welch is registering a peculiarity about OMF, one which Christine Edzards tried to pull out of Little Dorrit by removing the idiosyncratic grotesques and concentrating just on two central figures as if the story were seen from their consciousness (Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clenham). It’s set up as a mystery with complicated plot, but that’s not what the text really lends itself to. It’s more a series of dramatic picturse linked through allegory. I noticed for the first time that the Podsnaps are totally omitted from Welch’s film, and how sidelined Mr Twemlow is. That’s in line with Edzards’s film. Mr Twemlow is a comic repeat of decency, only comically puzzled and the Podsnaps another set of grotesques, more hateful in their effect than the Lammles who are at some level (especially in Part 4 of Welch’s film) pathetic, as contemptible in our eyes as they ought to be in their own and the world’s were the world’s values humane. (At the end of the Part 4 the Lammles hook on to another innocent couple to live off them.)

I’ve been very moved by Welch’s film; I love how the characters finally come together — the sudden wild violence of Steven Mackintosh as “our mutual friend” — for he has provided the wherewithal to support Bella, by extension Bella’s father, the Boffins. On Welch’s account it’s John Harmon who is the Dickens figure in this novel, the alter ego, not the more dramatically riveting Wrayburn or Headstone.

All three are Dickens in a sense (Wrayburn what he rejected but impulses in him), but Harmon stands for what is good — as does Arthur Clenham, what is right. Seeing the book this way turns it on a pivot for me and makes it if not easier to get into and engage with at least growing out of a central vision underlying the later books. This time he’s simply made a quieter book.

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The green and lovely gardens surrounding the house John Harmon can provide the Boffins and Bella and his child with; we see Jenny and Sloppy join them in a picnic scene

Lammles forever playacting, forever to be humiliated hangers-on

When I came to the end of the film I was very moved. This is one of the great — of many great film adaptations done by the BBC or British TV — and occasionally by commercial groups for movie-houses. The idyllic ending for some had been prepared for in Part 3 when they reached out to one another (Bella and John’s beautifully unadorned marriage with just the father behind them walking in the park); the lousy ending for others by their egoism (the Lammles with their opulent wedding and now cold mean life). Welch had filled out Dickens’s characters with her projection of human need. I can only hope the new spirit abroad of making travesties which assume the audience has not read and would not even like the book fall down on the reality the audience they seek really is not keen on this genre for real – not done with depth of emotion and seriously conceived interaction between era, text, film.

The film also ends with yet another stalking sequence: now the fierce hateful Riderhood stalks Bradley Headstone. We do feel very much for Headstone: this man is a rat, a snake; David Bradley the actor who did the part looks like the actor who did Wegg: Kenneth Cranham. Both are older thin man with heads that can be made up to look skull-like.

Headstone says he never had a friend and when it’s clear that Riderhood (David Bradley — have I done justice to his performance) is going to suck him dry, he’ll starve. He walks away and Riderhood follows and of course what happens is the lonely desperate hurt man (whom no one would know any more than the people at the end of the film will know Lizzie) turns on Riderhood and takes him down to drowning with him.

So the antepenultimate scene of the film is the filthy scary greasy polluted waterways with bodies seen floating in it. Where we began. (The pipeline so touted that Obama did reject would take filthy oil down the center of the US to be exported; not to get any jobs for anyone in the US, and it would pollute). Have people heard of fracking? OMF is about 19th century fracking.

The penultimate scene is a montage partly scene from Mortimer Lightwood’s point of view — he is the only unpaired presence:

Mortimer Lightwood (Dominic Mafham looking down at Eugene in bed)

where we see Sloppy taken in by Jenny and they become a couple interspersed with Rokesmith and Bella and baby and the Boffins on a blanket. Mr Wifur seems forgotten here. (So too Lizzie’s brother but then he wanted to be.) We hear Eugene talk of how he might go abroad with Lizzie but Lightwood would miss him. The perspective on this scene is Lightwood as outsider but needing these people too. Wrayburn wants to go abroad for the wrong reasons: he’s ashamed. He should not be he’s told. Rokesmith rowing and his face seen.

I loved the last scene. After all Podsnap might have been in the social scenes: if the fat nasty man so gussied up is him. Well he and Lady Tippins and everyone are sneering at a party at Wrayburn for marrying this waterman’s daughter. They are disgusted. Why Lightwood stays with these people is beyond me — but it’s what makes us see them. Lightwood appeals to Twemlow and Twenlow has his great moment: they are shits, and what’s most their point of view is stupid and ugly. It’s articulated very generally: anyone who lives in accordance with what he or she thinks is the imagined respect of society is a fool for in a way there is no such thing. “Society’ is a shallow mirror we make up with our own minds, and anyway (to be particular) Wrayburn never cared for these people any way.

A curious contradiction: we are to grieve for Headstone for not having any friends but at the same time see that false friends and the world’s admiration is not worth the loss of your soul. The camera ends on Twemlow and Lightwood.

I liked that ending very much though I’m not sure it was Dickens’s emphasis. It seems to me to speak to 21st century people and come out of a particular perpsective often seen in the finest costume dramas made by women and a few men too.

Eugene and Lizzie’s hands holding tight to one another

In Welch’s film, the pair are never shown in close conversation — except one scene half suggestive itself where he is trying to get her to come and live with him. Even then it’s seen from
afar. It’s all vignettes. When Wrayburn talks, it’s to Mortimore
Lightwood; when Lizzie talks it’s to her brother, father, Abby, Jenny Wren, and except to her brother, it’s all reactive. We see Bella visit her but hear no conversation. In the book is it that we are made aware of how different in class and education they are?

Welch’s is quite different from Davies’s presentation of Amy Dorrit and Clenham: Davies fills in the relationhips, and in Dickens’s book while the scenes between Amy and Arthur are not dramatized, they are told in the third person indirect mode. (Too much is made of showing and not telling, until the 20th century the scene described was as common as the one dramatized.)

This film and book certainly made my spirits soar and validated what I know to be the correct view but one it needs strength to hold to because there are too many Lady Tippins and Podsnaps and Lammles about, to say nothing of their instruments and the hateful complicit angry people serving them too.

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At work in the garbage dumps of the film’s world — out of which money is to be made; the actor here when he pulls off his mask turns out to be Sloppy (Martin Hancock), the disabled young man Mrs Higden took in

Finally, we come back to the river. It is the case that in the 19th century the Thames River was (relatively speaking, say compared to today) stuffed with corpses. The vision that Our Mutual Friend projects is not a fantasy nightmare. Many ways to look at this, but I’ll content myself with being literary and say it’s another instance of how the gothic genre is as real, and can actually tell us more about what’s important in life than books which adhere to what’s called “realism” (Trollope is called realistic).

Unfortunately, we have no photos of people dredging the Thames for corpses or dropping them in, but I did see a reproduction which has something of the same meaning as Our Mutual Friend‘s real life symbols: at the Museum of Modern Art there’s a show on of murals by Diego Rivera (see just below for the LRB column by Hal Foster on this) and one includes “Frozen Assets:”

Our modern more decorous version of corpses at least here in the US (outside the US until very recently it was rare for the armies of capitalism to attack citizens outright — now drones are okay too inside the US) does not include soaked human bodies floating in or underneath our waterways as a usual thing. For dead bodies we must go to the streets where they are dragged off to the side, or better yet, hospitals (yes hospitals) where if the person is brought back, it’s with a huge bill. In a way what a black joke is there: the body brought back is priced (chattel slavery priced people too)

Anyway Hal Foster describes the Rivera mural impeccably:

“Frozen Assets is an inspired montage: Rivera based the vault on those he had toured in Wall Street and the hangar on the interior of the Municipal Pier on East 25th Street, while his skyline combines a few downtown banks with several new buildings in midtown, including the Chrysler, Empire State, McGraw-Hill, Daily News and Rockefeller Center (the last three of which were designed by Rockefeller favourite Raymond Hood). The allegory of this literal exposé is explicit: the building boom that gave us the great skyscraper city depended on the cheap labour represented by the subway drones and the sleeping bodies as much as on the stashed assets. In this not-so-divine comedy, the pier is a grey purgatory and the vault a brown hell, as much prison as bank (in this faecal cavern, Rivera almost suggests the anal sadism that Freud associated with money). Only the skyscrapers have any vitality, but their animation is fetishistic; indeed, Frozen Assets depicts a fetishisation of capital on a metropolitan scale, in which urban liveliness counts far more than the actual livelihood of working men and women; unlike the labouring bodies in the other murals, they are the real ‘frozen assets’ here.

Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets (1930)

It may be not be realized but today again aging people in the US fear nursing homes the way the poor in Dickenss’s time feared the poor- and work-house

Another death scene: Lizzie caring for Mrs Betty Higden (Edna Dore), Welch’s interpretation emphasizes the loving care, but the words are the terror Dickens gives the old woman

I understand there is a film adaptation of Edwin Drood “in the works”. I hope so for I’d like to see a good film adaptation in the tradition of the older ones like this of that last book. There is enough there to figure out an ending Dickens probably meant.

Ellen

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Two new blogs — or old blogs moved and re-conceived

Helen McNicholl (1879-1915), In the Shade of the Tent (1914)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to tell people who come here that I’ve moved and changed my other blog and invented a third.

First, I moved my Reveries under the Sign of Austen to wordpress. This is a more appropriate space, as many blogs here have themes and are essay-like, and people can subscribe to this blog, but I moved because I became unable to cope with the constant disappearance of livejournal and the freakish working of their software as it was attacked repeatedly this summer.

So here’s an explanation why I moved it and that it is really a continuation of the old blog, with the difference I’ll try to keep on (however widely conceived) topic:

A Continuation

And two first typical blogs:

Women’s friendships and the gothic in Davies’s Northanger Abbey films

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 35, Tues-Wed, 5-6 May 1801, from the Paragon

The space in which my older Austen Reveries blog lived (so to speak) is now a blog meant to be personal, autobiographical, seasonal: Under the Sign of Sylvia. My gravator or icon is now Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. I first explained my pseudonym once again: Why Sylvia. Then I wrote a new blog in the new style intended, it’s about a central breakthrough in conception about myself I had this past year:

Upon realizing I have many Aspergers traits.

I used Nell Blaine’s Cookie Shop once before on this blog in an attempt to talk about myself and my conversion experience into feminism: This long morphing life so have used a different picture to capture a summer’s day (what it is as I type this) in a mode congenial to my own, an woman impressionist unfortunately not well-known, Helen McNicholl, In the Shade of the Tent (see above): one woman is reading, the other painting; I like to think they are friends and wish the image had come out with a little less yellow.

Now this blog will be for Everything Else! and I conclude with Claire Genoux’s Saisons du corps as translated by Ellen Hinsey, New European Poets, Miller & Prufer eds.

If I had loved better
these days with their good smell of bark
these copper twilights
the mountains exposing their toothless jaws
if I had walked more upright
along trails that lead toward dawn
where faith shelters us from doubts and time

if I had known how to savor the full laugh
of the river that rocks in its fleece of leaves
my head held to the trunk’s pillow
my cheek cast amidst thyme
if I hadn’t fled like a coward to the back streets
and believed in the false lights of the city
in its burning waltz of noise

perhaps I wouldn’t–stumbling
rake my wooden head against the walls of night

The French original:

J’accepte Vie d’être votre hôte
de manger votre terre jusqu’à l’indigestion
de boire dans vos gobelets de craie
la lumière cachée des saisons le miel refroidi de vos fleurs
et mille liqueurs grossières

vous voyez j’obéis
les os bougent parfaitement dans le cuir de ma peau
et je colle mon ventre au ventre des hommes
j’obéis même si je me mouche dans votre nappe
que je crache dans vos plats

quand j’aurai bien ri bien usé la corne de mon cœur
j’accepte oui l’effroi
docilement dissoudre ma détresse de cadavre
mais durant cette sieste
enrobée dans votre drap de ravines
mon ventre bombé contre le ventre de la terre
que je jouisse de vos rêves de lait et d’astres
que tous ces repas de fortune pris jadis à votre table
aient la légèreté sur mon crâne et l’ivresse folle
d’une petite neige de printemps

Go gentle reader into the world here, of lakes, of houses and the past hidden in the woods, and what lies all about.

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93), Evening, Knostop, Old Hall (1870)

Ellen

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Winston Graham’s Bella Poldark: the last Poldark novel (12, Cornwall 1818-20): bonding with characters

Jealousy is a very strange thing is it not? … jealousy or in its lesser form possessiveness — inhabits us all. It is like a microbe that lives within any family, touches all human relations. Perhaps it is the least admirable of feelings … Ross to Demelza on her rejection of Valentine, Bk 1, ch 11, p 129

” … in this life it is better to live by absolutes, not to live by subtle dealings that no one can understand … Harriet to Ross, Book 3, Ch 5, p 467)”

Jeremy Poldark (Ioan Gufford) and Ben Carter (Hans Matheson) rowing into Nampara Cove (1996 Poldark, Stranger from the Sea)

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I finished Bella Poldark, the 12th and last of the Poldark novels. Written a year (2002) before Graham died (2003), this book brings the series to a fitting conclusion: the tragic death of the boy Ross Poldark impregnated Elizabeth Chynoweth Poldark with on the night (May 2, 1793) he raped her. I have put off writing this blog because I don’t have any fitting pictures for Valentine and the characters he involves himself with, the older adult lives of Ross and Demelza Poldark’s daughters, the widowed Clowance and young woman, Bella, and the new characters to become central to the novel, the disabled Music Thomas and Agneta Treneglos. Still I don’t want to leave the story unfinished, so will use what I can of Cornwall, and from the 1977-76, 77-78 and 1996 movies.

I fell into this book more intensely than I have for the last three. It was a little bemusing to consider there had been 11 years between the last book (Twisted Sword) and this one (Bella) and the opening chapters which insistently and moving record the grieving of the characters, some more overtly because they have such bitter memories of their own (Clowance who now knows for sure that she was never really married to Stephen as his first wife was still alive when he married her) or this young man was central to their existence (Demelza, his mother). It’s a felt death like this was a real person not a character.

The slow motion build-up of all the veins in the novels over several is partly what gives the books their feel of reality, for Jeremy Poldark first appeared for real as an adult presence in the eighth book (Stranger from the Sea) — though his birth was the culmination of the third (appropriately as it now turns after named after him. Since Jeremy’s birth was a first culmination and stood for continuing ongoing hope in Ross and Demelza’s marriage (Jeremy Poldark, the 3rd novel), his death is indeed the penultimate dark note in this series. Valentine’s is the last. I especially regret having no image for him (by an actor)

One element in it for me throughout has been is that I’ve bonded with Graham’s central character again and again and through these the implied author. That is probably central to my experience of comfort books: I bond with someone or a presence in the book. I’ve loved Ross, Demelza, Jinny Carter

Jinny (Gillian Bailey) and Jim Carter (Stuart Doughty) (their wedding day, he died early in the series, of disease and starvation in prison)

Drake Carne, Mowenna, Elizabeth (yes), and (to a lesser extent), Sam Carne, Emma Tregirls, and Rosina Hobyn, and by the end of the series Clowance, Jeremy and felt obscurely deeply even for Valentine and his ape.

The instinctive feminism of the series is still strongly in evidence, but in a new way, a new set of circumstances worked out to show women getting a “rough” or “raw deal” (Graham’s words in his Memoir): we see how a woman has no control over her children, the child may just be taken from her and no matter what others think of the father, they will not help her to get her child back but rather push her into going to live with the father/husband again. Further, that in last novel (a development out of the 11th) Graham shows real empathy with disabled people too — in a male and a female character. He shows how the local society’s response to them makes them what they are in part (better functioning or less). We see how risky it is especially for women who are susceptible to sexual bullying and rape (and death). In the male we may have the first autistic character to be dramatized in popular fiction. An unsung beauty in Graham.

I probably have not done real justice to the specific historical and political juncture (the 1820s) than I should have done. I needed to know more about Caroline of Brunswick than I do, of Canning, Liverpool, the specifics of war and politics in Europe and the UK.

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Ross Poldark (Robin Ellis) as outside (1977-78 Poldark, Pt 11)

Bella, Book 1: Valentine

The novel is divided into five tight chunks, each one named after a central character in it. As in the case of Graham’s 2nd, 3rd and 4th novels (each named after a character), this does not mean the character figures centrally in all or even the majority of the scenes, nor that they are the teller. It’s rather that they as a central concept or presence is brooding over the book. Here it’s Ross’s illegitimate son’s amorality and his relationship to Ross; by the book’s end the rumors about Ross as father are brought before thickly before us (everyone knows), made probable (someone asks why he did not call his child by Serena, Ross instead of George) and it ends on a conversation between Demelza and Ross where they skirt around this. He is led to pay more attention to Valentine form Valentine’s beginning to come to him, both of which are partly brought on by the death of his legitimate and (now realized fully) much beloved older son, Jeremy.

It begins with a landscape — very typical and the character leading is Valentine. I knew eventually he must take central place, and it seems he will. In this opening he is doing much mischief — quietly and in ways people don’t do anything about. He has an odd step from his rickets and is recognizable from this. Ross Poldark is the POV and encounters Valentine coming back from the Treneglos house, where he has been visiting – he says a kitchen maid, Carla May. ‘

In the next segment Demelza tells Ross there is probably no such person, but rather Valentine is visiting the daughter of the man who owns the house, Agneta Treneglos, and it emerges quickly that Graham has invented another disabled person: something is wrong with her mental abilities but like Music Thomas it’s ambiguous. The ugly thing is this makes her desperate and vulnerable to Valentine and thus amuses him.

In a second encounter with his (biological) actual father, Valentine proposes that Ross come in with him on new smuggling schemes. The narrator is careful to reassure us that Ross will not; the aim of the scene is to set a plot in motion and reveal more of this young man — he is reaching out I suppose. We also hear once again of Selena, Valentine’s pregnant wife and how she has tried to slit her wrists — he’s said to be a sadistic kind of lover too. None of this feels melodramatic in the text and none is improbable or anything anyone does anything about.

A second character emerging is Clowance who lives apart from her parents at Trenwyn, now keeping up Stephen’s business. She is invited by George Warleggan’s wife, Lady Harriet to a party where Harriet is trying to get her to start accepting courtships and introduces a viable candidate, so to speak, a Mr Prideaux who then persists, and makes the mistake of when he finds her in Truro inviting her to have tea with someone he thinks she’ll like to be with: Cuby Trevanion Poldark.

The meeting is bitter and difficult for Clowance still holds Jeremy’s death against Cuby. Jeremy would not have joined the army but for Cuby’s first rejection of him is Clowance’s view. No one of Jeremy’s family takes any joy or interest in the congratulations people give them over his “hero’s glorious death.” Clowance does not visit her parents to avoid telling them (she’d be tempted) how Stephen betrayed her by marrying her bigamously, and to avoid Cuby who is there with Noelle, the first grandchild, a lot we are told. Though she has returned to early loyalties too and stays with her brother whose scheme it had been to marry her to Valentine. It was Valentine who broke that off.

Small theads start up again: Paul Kellows, the only one left of the three who robbed George Warleggan, now half-thriving, Dr Enys called in to the birth of Selena’s child (we realize Ross’s second grandchild), and Caroline to accompany Demelza to London. Ross and Demelza’s second living daughter, Isabella-Rose now 17, is still in love with Christopher Havergal who comes to propose marriage and say that preparatory to that (if she’s too young), she should come to London to have good masters for her singing.

Ross (John Bowe) and Demelza (Mel Martin) in bed together (96 Poldark)

Demelza and Ross have a long scene of talking in bed too: this indwelling between them endows the whole narrative with memory. She is now looking at the reality that only one small child is left to her. Two dead (Julia long ago, and now Jeremy), one staying away (Clowance) and at age 17 (Demelza’s age when she married Ross), Isabella-Rose to leave too. The one left the baby, Harry, had late in life — an afterthought. I felt for her loneliness. How lonely I am. And Ross? he could return to Parliament but his business which was to end the war in France, help his son, Jeremy, is now useless and as he looks out he sees not prosperity but more misery.

The government we are told is stopping war spending and the result is wide spread lack of jobs — this book was written 2001-2. Also the technological changes are throwing out more and the first grumblings of the Captain Swing riot begun. What to do in such a world?

A sort of dark mystery is brewing: it seems there have been a series of murders of women unexplained and un-investigated because so little is known about these victims. Menial marginalized females. Ross admits that some of Valentine’s ugliness comes from his having had a terrible childhood after his mother, Elizabeth died, as George Warleggan while keeping his word to treat Valentine as his son, never loved him, endlessly distrusted him, and now they are permanently estranged. Valentine to give him his due comes to his legitimate father with the news he is calling his son George; he is cold and distanced, but it doesn’t take much to realize this is a sort of attempt to heal the breach. It does not. If anything Harriet’s favoring Valentine, just embittered George further.

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Trenwith, the ancestral home of the Poldarks (Goldolphin House, Cornwall)

Book 2: Agneta

The second book is named Agneta, after this mentally disabled young woman Valentine has been taking sexual advantage of for months. So Graham has brought to the fore his interest in people ambiguously disabled who are at great risk from the society since it refuses to help them at all generally. (There is a scene in the first book of cur types jeering at someone which links up to this theme.) Her father, John Treneglos actually visits Ross to demand some sort of reparation or help or revenge on the assumed supposition Ross is responsible (as Valentine’s real father), and Ross must tell him he has no control over this man.

The book begins with a set of letters: from George Canning (the closest Graham gets to providing a world historical character): he is urging Ross to return to public life and by way of chatting provides scenarios of politics across Europe and the Peterboro Massacre. It’s not only highly unusual to get such a knowing discussion of politics in and out of the UK in 1818 but one from the strongly leftist point of view — I rush to say that’s not Canning’s but is conveyed by Graham as the invisible narrator who writes from a perspective that lets us go beyond Canning’s point of view. I am again at something of a loss for knowing little of foreign affairs, especially George Liverpool, then prime minister and powerful.

From Clowance to an upper class young man who wanted to marry her (natch) and whose great house estate she and her mother visited, Lord Fitzmaurice. Again a large picture of society from this angle provided. Finally the young gifted daughter of Ross and Demelza, Isabella-Rose comes home from London with her suitor, Christopher Havergal. Now a whiff of the silver fork world from the point of view of fringe people

This is going to be backdrop for a character who is at risk as autistic.

Valentine is now accused of the murder of Agneta. She was seen (and we experience this scene) chasing after him, and he politely turning her away. She then went home after which she disappeared. After a several day hunt, her body was found with her throat brutally cut with slashes of knives – the way one of the marginalized women of the district was found. In her case her relatives did care: Ruth, who once wanted to marry Ross, her husband, this girl’s father, John. Even if she was disabled they loved her — maybe all the more in a curious twisted kind of way.

There is no evidence to convict Valentine whatsoever beyond the community knowledge he seduced, played with and then turned her away. His wife, Selena, has left him and gone to live at Cardew, with her father-in-law, George Warleggan who would not have taken her in but for Harriet. He is the putative grandfather and Harriet the only grandmother in place.

Ben Carter, now risen to become Ross’s foreman, is slowly coming to accept that Music Thomas is his brother-in-law and we see him walk with Music and Esther Carne, another (low) relative of Demelza and Sam. As to class and type they are suited at any rate. And Bella comes home to be with little Henry. Valentine does visit this family.

Hanging over the narrative is a sense of fear that there is a murderer in the community and we fear for everyone.

From the 96 Poldark, this suggests a hunt for a dangerous man

It might seem an otiose sort of plot-design to have a man who every probability points to murdered a young woman be turned into a suspect no one can arraign for lack of evidence and because he seems to have an air-tight alibi. But I see that Graham is after another sort of game here.

The book is another instance of Graham’s instinctive feminism. In order to help exonerate himself and get people to endure and talk with him, to keep himself inside his community, Valentine begins to black-mouth this young woman. He sneers at the idea she was “simple-witted” and begins to spread rumours she regularly had sex with many men and was a calculating wanton loose woman. The reality is that when she did go to parties, she was very bad at coping with male aggression and harassment and she did like to be the center of attraction and momentarily would be lured to private spots and let a certain amount of sex go on. That’s all that’s needed for many people in the area to dismiss her death as deserved. And among those who know that Valentine is a liar, is capable of blackening the girl this way, and doubt his alibi (his mother-in-law, Lady Harriet) the portrait of the girl rings ‘true enough’ that she too dismisses the girl.

Yesterday I read an article in Women’s Review of Books about a continuing spate of murders of factory and other marginalized women of all sorts along the Mexican-US border on the Mexican side. It’s been known about for years. It’s sometimes referred to as the femicide going on in Ciudad Juarez. The reviewer of the book, Making a Killing by Alcia Gaspar de Alva, with Georgina Guzman, Margaret Randall ends up contextualizing this ongoing slow slaughter with larger spates of murders (the supposed suicides of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow) with the continuing cultural disregard, fear and dislike of women we see today in many forms. Recently here in the west in 3 rape cases and recently a young woman accused of murdering her 2 year who was acquitted: there was no outcry against acquitting the rapists as there has been again acquitting this woman.

This is what Graham is showing us. He repeatedly has her relatives grieving and horrified and unable to defend her – because they buy into the same values, Their only defense is that she was disabled. That does not prevent people from assuming she was “loose.” Dr Enys testifies in a judicial way and is not heard.

The one person who acts on the supposition that Valentine is dangerous is his wife. She finds herself coerced into returning to his house and a couple of days later flees with her daughter once again as far as she can: a relative in London.

Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) realizing she had bound herself for life to a cruel tyrant (77-78 Poldark)

The depiction of this adds to the depictions of marital rape, of his heroine Demelza’s liaison and her refusal to stay in London as someone unsuited to cope, and the death of his other heroine, Elizabeth, as an escape from the misery of a life subjected to a man who thought Valentine not his and memories of a rape which did cause the existence of this boy make this aspect of liberty in the novels clear. The conventional stories of say Verity marrying the man she loved against her family’s will don’t come near these in power or radicalness — though it’s unheralded and done so quietly in and outside these books. That Agneta is also disabled adds to the point and shows an instinctive reaching out to who is hurt most.

There are stretches of the non-alive kind of thing one sees in all the books after The Angry Tide, as, for examples, we visit Geoffrey Charles (with Demelza) and see his wife is pregnant again. Graham is playing with his characters’ previous histories and moving them around the board but he is still interested in the history. So the framing is signficant: Philip Prideaux, interested in Clowance, visits the High Sheriff of Cornwall who confirms a picture of law and custom in the era. Despite draconian punishments, many crimes are committed with impunity because 1) this sort of thing is part of reality all the time, and 2) there is no organized police, and we get a sketch of the glimmerings of a police and other community organizations to deal with crime first in 1820.

Valentine has had the nerve to show up to his half-brother Geoffrey Charles’s party at Trenwith — where all the characters are brought together. It’s like OJSimpson showing up to a party of movie colleagues on the day after the trial acquittal. He is all aplomb, talking to others, but curious, he brings a sidekick plus an ape, Butto, who he has rescued from a savage organ grinding master who was torturing the poor creature (burning its feet) to make it dance. We see him provide a comfortable place for the creature to sleep that night. He identifies.

The non-alive stuff continues: Ross dances with Harriet, supposedly this is to make frissons in the narrative and there is strain between him and Demelza as they remember their previous history. Demelza is of course still so beautiful, &c&c. This won’t do.

As Book 2 comes to an end, we have a new character introduced — it’s against the rules as Austen would say. A French fringe aristocrat drawn to Bella, a musician composer. If Graham had lived, this would be a new line which could move the story into Italy, and, to my surprise Book 3 is named after him: Maurice Valery. Like other conventional heroines, Bella now has several eager suitors — as does Clowance. Ho hum.

The interest of this part resides in this lurking murderer. Graham is bringing into his historical fiction his techniques from mystery stories. There is a genuinely anxiety producing fearful sequence where Demelza is coming home from visiting the Paynters late at night and feels the presence of someone following her .She hears a footstep, sees a shadow moving. I have this kind of sense and can intuit someone there when they are quietly so. It’s a street sense born of years of living in New York City (Manhattan, the Bronx). She tries to be calm, talks aloud to someone if they are there, but suddenly realizing this is serious — of course she’s thinking of these murders — she begins to run and succeeds in reaching her brother’s church and people. She asks someone to accompany her home and send someone to accompany her daughter who went walking to another house at night.

I do think it’s Valentine and the interest is that it is him, that is the psychology that is behind this man’s very sick behavior — for in a way he has been made sick by the way his parents and all around them behaved to him intimately and the values he found exemplified by powerful people and what he realized that as the favored eldest son of a rich and powerful man he could get away with and even seemed admired for – by other commonly vicious people. It reminds me of Graham’s Marnie where he explored this kind of thing.

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Drury Lane Theater, end of the 18th century

Book 3: Maurice

The fiction now makes the argument implicitly — through story, dramatization, explicit comment — for sexual liberty for women as well as men.

Bella’s attempt to make a career for herself as a singer in London allows Graham to depict the commercial world of music in London in the early 19th century. What he shows reminds me closely of what is seen in Daniel Deronda. It’s all private concerts through patronage, tutoring and the reach of your teacher socially — after it’s been ascertained your voice is one which will please a different levels of crowds.

Valentine’s adoption of Butto enables Graham to show us the state of animal knowledge at the tie and how animals were regarded. This fits in with what has emerged as his interest in disabled people, how vulnerable they are (Agneta and Music Thomas), and what can be the fruitfulness of their lives if others will react with humanity and insight. I can’t tell whether Butto is supposed to be a chimp or bonobo or even orangutan (if the latter, the poor thing would be suffering even worse); I hardly think it can be a gorilla (too big) Of course he is growing up and becoming strong and violent under his imprisonment (for what’s what captivity no matter how humane feels like).

Fascinating how these historical fictions can deal with all sorts of issues …

While in London, coming out of a shop, Bella meets Letty Como who introduces herself to Letty, who clearly wants to show hersefl to Bella as Christopher Havergal’s coming wife. At first Christopher tries to brush the topic of this young woman off, but pretty quickly Christopher has no qualms in letting Bella knows that Letty is a prositute (high class, not in the streets) and once his mistress. As she questions him, it becomes obvious that “once” is an exaggeration. He saw Letty less than 3 weeks ago. It’s fine it seems for him to have a mistress, to deceive her: the tune “men were deceivers ever” is alluded to by Christopher.

Ben Carter marries Esther Carne (Demelza’s niece) and at the wedding, Valentine’s ape, Butto, shows up, disrupting the festivities. Again Ross is turned to — but before he can act, Valentine shows up to take his pet home. Geoffrey Charles grows very angry — as Esther’s employer and half-brother he has some authority to speak. Valentine gets the animal to leave.

Bella is home again and goes for a walk on the beach with Clowance, and the two talk indirectly of their intense disillusionment, As Bella is considering marrying, so Clowance remarrying Philip Prideaux or perhaps Fitzmaurice. Bella now speaks thinking about (the reader knows) this revelation of Christopher’s other activities and past (I’ll put it) and Clowance of Stephen’s betrayal of her by having married her while still married to another and his many lies. Fitzmaurice wants her to visit him at his country house. Bella says that men “think it is their right” to behave this way, and Clowance wonders about this “way of the world” and would not she be better off if she had had other young men besides Stephen? Should not she be “better equipped to take another husband.”

Demelza when young (Angharad Rees) with Hugh Armitage (Brian Stirne)r

If one thinks back to the all the incidents over the series of the novels, especially Demelza’s love affair with Hugh Armitage which Ross never got over though he expected her to accept his love for and rape of Elizabeth, the depiction of marital rape in the book (as what coerced marriage is about) and Emma who refused to marry Sam and married prudently after a series of lovers (fudged in the representation) you can see Graham is making a radical argument for women’s sexual liberty. This idea lies behind his Cordelia where an affair enables the heroine to grow up, and her inability to have an affair is part of Marnie’s disability.

This is not to say that the book suggests integrity and truth-telling not important. Paradoxically it does; rather he seems to be for open marriage if one can manage this. Very hard for human beings, especially men.

The next day Clowance and Bella visit Valentine who they think their cousin. He’s their half-brother. They find his house in a shambles, he half-drunk, so too Paul Kellowes and some prostitutes in the house. He is not repentant and repeats his demand that his wife, Selina should come home to him and live with hm on his terms. Right. They feed the poor chimp some bananas.

I don’t find the book melodramatic for it seems to me Valentine is real as are the other characters. It has taken a radical turn through the use of disabled characters, the adoption of a chimp to save it from torture, death, and this character the product of a rape neither man (George Warleggan or Ross) was willing to acknowledge generously.

Some lovely description of Cornwall:

A curtain of mist hung over the Black Cliffs at the further end of Hendrawna Beach, most of it caused by spray hitting the tall rocks and drifting before the breeze. There was a heavy swell which reached far out to sea, and a couple of fishing boats from St Ann’s had gone scudding back to the safety of the very unsafe har­bour. Gulls were riding the swell, lifting high and low as the waves came in; occasionally they took to the air in a flurry of flapping white when a wave unexpectedly spilled its head. No one yet expected rain: that would be tomorrow. The sun was losing its brilliance and hung in the sky like a guinea behind a muslin cloth.
Clowance squinted up at the weather. ‘Have you got a watch?’
[Bella] ‘No. Not one that goes.’

Clowance now has a letter in which a not-so-young young man proposes to her, Lord Fitzmaurice, in such terms of courteous upright abjection that it would not be out of place in Sir Charles Grandison. (Chapters 4-7). This will not do.

Bella elopes with Maurice Valery to Rouen where she has been sort of promised the leading role in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. She tells a false story to her mother in a letter (that she is chaperoned) when it is partly an escapade where in fact there is no firm promise and no chaperon. This is somewhat better but not much as we are expected to believe Demelza would accept this, so too Caroline’s aunt (with whom Bella was staying) without this being publicly declared “a ruin” (whatever the women might think privately). Plus the father, Ross, is supposed complacent. All anachronistic.

George Warleggan (Michael Attwell), first meeting with Lady Harriet (Sarah Carpenter (96 Poldark, Stranger from the Sea)

Better is George comes near death through falling off his horse into a fast running river near a mine, a partial replay of Francis Poldark’s death as we are with the man as he manages to find a ledge and hold on and wait. Only this man is saved by his much more vigorous alert wife, Harriet. She may not be much fun for him to live with but she’s an effective personality. He is not grateful to her dogs who did the scouting out of the shouts she hears when she draws near after she gets a map from the man he had been visiting on business.

Not so improbably and suddenly alive with the actual life that runs through these novels is Ross’s sudden visit to George when Ross hears he came near death. Ross has a proposition: he wants to buy up Valentine’s mine which Valentine has been supporting through smuggling as it’s not a working concern, as the smuggling agent has been arrested and will turn evidence if nothing is done to remove it from view. Ross’s motive is to spare “Elizabeth’s son.” George would have refused but again Harriet intervenes as this is just spite and moral stupidity. This is a good scene — as well as the near murder of a local peasant girl, Jean Heligan. We get a glimpse of the frightening tall figure in black with his rough knife. Jean is strong and throws him off and escapes. She tells her story to the magistrates. More than one man fits the description: beyond Valentine there is Philip Prideaux, who in the novel functions as agent for quite a number of people (police, Ross to Valentine unknown to Valentine to persuade him to give up this losing mine).

Valentine is nothing if not really perceptive — part of the fascination of the character is this. He sees through Ross’s ploy to keep him out of prison, but nonetheless lets Prideaux buy up Wheal Elizabeth. We get more of Valentine’s curious household (Chapters 8-9). Not only is there this ape which he really is fond of, but the Kellows, Paul continually drunk and Daisy now dying (she was the one seduced and abandoned by Stephen Carrington around the time he married Clowance). They are a family striken down by TB, with no help anywhere from anyone for real. Paul was one of the original three who robbed Warleggan’s bank, the only one left standing now.

As part of the mystery plot Paul informs Valentine that cleft where Agneta’s body has been found has been relocated and people are investigating it.

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Clowance (Kelly Reilly) associated with a love of horses, of riding (96 Poldark)

Book 4: Clowance

Book 4 opens with a large political event: the coming to England of the unwanted Caroline. Having set the time by Caroline’s attempt to participate in the coronation, Graham reverts to his stories and there is again real power. Bella (Isabella-Rose – what a name) has become lovers with Maurice, and Ross comes to see her play in Rouen. He realizes that something intimate and real is going on between them, but before this can be taken further, the story reverts to Clowance and her acceptance of Lord Edward Fitzmaurice.

The decision comes out of a mindset that begins to resemble that of Elizabeth Chynoweth in the early Poldark books. Having experienced the realities of male deceit in sexual matters, and what love did not bring her (though the sex was good), she now wants to make a decision to marry on prudential self-interested grounds. We saw where that led ultimately Elizabeth. The first husband, Francis, ended up bankrupt, and because she could not get herself to continue a strong sexual life with him, had mistresses, and (because in his nature too) drank heavily; unable to cope with the corrupt driving types around him, he betrayed the hero (Ross), and then became depressed, self-destructed. George was a moral horror to live with and her attempt to control him ended in her death.

Bella’s decision might be said to resemble Demelza’s who simply went to bed with Ross when she could — as his servant, not brought up not to. Demelza’s turns out to be a love match, but I suspect Bella’s will not. Indeed there seems some danger she’ll lose her voice; if so, this is punitive and reminds me of other male fictions where the problem of a female’s ambition is solved by her losing her gift. Women authors do it too: George Eliot has a poem in this vein.

The story begins again to have intense feeling when we are told by a letter by Demelza to Clowance that Ross has returned with Bella very sick, “Morbid throat.” I know realize this is diptheria. Clowance determines to return home just as her letter accepting Edward reaches him and he frantically rides across England to reach her. He turns up and they realize they are strangers; both offer to back down. She thinks he sees her as this poor widow in a tiny cottage, which she is but we are asked to idealize this guy. He begins to remind me of Drake: Graham’s idea of a good kind man in deep love despite himself.

Ever available and convenient, Caroline (knows everyone of course) offers to give Edward a place to live while Clowance goes to help her mother nurse this sister.

The power of the narrative comes in here. It’s possible a couple like Ross and Demelza could lose another child. Jeremy now dead, they could lose this daughter in just the way they did the first (Demelza). Graham perhaps overdoes the parallel by having Ross remember the contrasting times of year, and he whitewashes what Ross did partly in reaction (led a riot) but the whole seqence is effective.

She could have died. Graham killed off Jeremy — and before that Francis, Elizabeth, Armitage. Death was common. She does seem to be coming through.

Drake Carne (Kevin McNally), Morwenna Chynoweth (Jane Wyman) with Geoffrey Charles (actor not listed) when young

I left off as Clowance and Edward are getting to know one another by walking along the beach – very much a reworking of the Drake-Morwenna romance.

For the finis

Bella goes on the stage cross-dressed as Romeo (in the spirit of Kemble)

and bonding with Elizabeth Chynoweth, Valentine’s mother:

When young

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