On a really enjoyable reading by Colm Toibin

Colm Toibin when much younger

Dear friends and readers,

Last night we went to a local bookstore which regularly hosts talks and classes about books (as well as a weekly storybook hour for children and tours too), Politics and Prose. We’d never been there before, and to the area only once, when last July we were invited to come to a fourth of July barbecue (what a treat for us). A member of the Irish embassy asked all those who came to read James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloom Day. We heard about this because Jim got an email from the Irish embassy which now has his name.

A large old-fashioned bookstore, two floor (!), where books are actually set up by their categories and within that the author’s name. A couple tables upfront with latest sellers, and in the back audiobooks on CD. You can wander about and come upon treasures just like this. I saw Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman (a biography of Lillian Hellman) on display, but had decided for Toibin’s Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, a book of somewhat rewritten essay-review meditations published elsewhere (the LRB, the NYRB and other places). If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how much I like his essays, and how I’ve loved those of his novels I’ve read thus far. It turns out I’ve read 4 of 7 (In praise of Colm Toibin: Un-put-downable).

Last night he was there to promote his latest novel (apparently the 7th), The Testament of Mary. Yes the central character is the Virgin Mary (does she have a last name like the rest of us?). It’s a really a novella, a short one at that, and from what he wrote a retrospective meditation by Mary some 20 years after the brutal crucifixion of her son. She is now living in safety, relative peace, left to herself by all and two visitors show up, one Lazarus. Yes he takes liberties — good historical fiction often does. The core idea is the irretrievableness of what happened and how she cannot forget and if she could change it, do it differently somehow, how she longs to. It’s memories poured out. As a subjective narrative by a women it harks back to his great The South. He seems to have a predilection for writing heroine’s texts (Brooklyn, Henry James in The Master is a kind of male heroine).

What a large crowd. It did not overwhelm the store, but it was much larger than we’d expected of such an intellectual sensitive author. There were not enough chairs for all.

He began by telling us of his trips to Venice and two paintings of the Virgin he had stood before repeated: a Tintoretto, perhaps The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and a Titian, The Assumption. What he seems to have liked especially about the latter was her red robe and how she soared above reality. He is himself getting older.

Recent photo — he does look like this, only he is a small man, somewhat bent, light brownish-white skin, light brown hair

Today I see that the Tintoretto has Mary in a red robe too, and the picture’s content against the reason for its festival, takes us across her life.

They were the inspiration for the book. He did not tell us why he wrote it, only that he would like it to be taken seriously and he didn’t mean it as a mock. He didn’t think the church would bother notice it — he said this in answer to one question afterwards. He does read very well, and his voice was how I’d imagined it, Irish lilt but not too heavy. I stayed awake and listening for much of it, though when his register came too low I couldn’t hear it all. We were in the back, having arrived only ten minutes before the “reading” started.

It was obvious he’d done this many times. He was smooth, and seemed such a sweet man. These sorts of things are part of what makes an author successful. The book launch. He’s learned how to do it. Among questions asked were does he have a routine, a place he always writes, what does he write with. He said he writes anywhere and with any thing (mostly a pen) and no he’s not a routine type. He does sometimes have to write a book quickly or whatever quickly lest he forget it; get it down, and then he comes back to work at it. He is not a man who has written a lot of very long books, say like Dickens, Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Wm Dean Howells, and they all had fixed routines and places they wrote. He has made his career through socializing too and his oeuvre (in pages) most actually be preponderantly non-fiction.

I wanted to reply to something he had said before starting his readings. He said that other “classic” fiction novels, 19th century, were no help “here.” He comically alluded to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, they could not help him. Nor Henry James. Perhaps Mrs Touchett (Ralph’s mother, isolated, alone, an “odd” woman.) While he was reading I thought of Daniel Deronda’s mother, Eliot’s older heroine who returns 25 years after giving her son up to another so she could have an operatic career, a life of her own. Now bitter, not remorseful, but regretful because after all she ended up marrying and having children anyway. The dreams she had had not been realized and how here was this son reproaching her.
But the mike was too far away.

I didn’t try to buy anything directly afterwards. The line became very long. Instead we walked three stores down to the Comet, a pizza place with ambience. A large screen played over and over the poignant short Italian film, The Red Balloon. No sound just the images before you. The walls gray. The tables ping-pong, the seats benches. Soft lights. We had two pizzas, small, a white (all cheese, garlicky nothing else) and a red (just tomato sauce topping, more spicy, reminding me in its heavy dough and yummy surface of pizza in NYC in the 1950s, so-called Napoles-like). A carafe of chianti. The place was moderately full.

We talked. We realized this was probably the first book reading we’ve ever gone to as such. Play readings by a group, lectures, maybe a book reading within a performance of other things, but not alone. Jim said we never went to the Folger poetry readings because they cost. This was for free. Also the people were less known and there was obviously time for too much talk. So too much egoism would be on display he felt. I remembered going to listen to Empson read his poem in the Graduate Center in the 1970s. How he read little and talked much of his poetry. But the talk was splendid, really insightful (as Toibin’s was not quite, though not deliberately misleading as say Andrew Davies on his films), and how John Hollander got up to ask questions, all admiring and how Empson (spiteful in this but perhaps made uncomfortable) cut him down, half-mocked him. Also a lecture by Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. All I can recall is how intelligent and humane she was and ever after have reacted to all dismissals of her work, denigrations of her with a memory of this seeing her and knowing they are unfair to her.

We decided we would try some more at this place. Then to support the bookstore, we went back. That’s when I bought Love in a Dark Time. All the Testaments to Mary were gone. To tell the truth, I was not sure I wanted it, as I felt it would be wrapped up in Catholicism as some level, and I’m an atheist. I was sure it’d be feminist in intent. If Toibin had said he found out or invented a last name for her, and told us of it, I might’ve. They had only had his most recent novels: (Blackwater Lightship two copies, one still left, and mostly Brooklyn and The Master, latest and best known. I have them all plus The South and Homage to Barcelona (not there). But there was suddenly one copy as if from deep in a basement (the girl at the counter said it was “a backlist” book), this book of essays. So I snatched it. His essay on Wilde’s exposure of his homosexuality as “found out,” as a person wanting to be “found out” has influenced my thinking ever since.

We got home by 10ish, not too long to write one final blog on Jane Austen’s letters. I’m not going to give them up, but maybe go yet slower and do it by myself. The prompting from Austen-l helps, and the sense (however deluded) of reaching people, but the flak, the continual cliched readings and occasional either preposterous or theoretical agendas don’t help me at all. I waste time and make no friends refuting them.

Earlier that day I had talked on WWWTTA about Temple Grandin’s film about how animals form bonds, friendships, and people’s perception of them, and the trajectory the film belonged to. Really worth while and gotten into other debates on the growing dissemination of how it’s okay for women to subjugate themselves to sadism, even light fun … ), but I’ll add these as brief comments here later today.

We wished we could have more such nights. People are only gradually becoming aware of what a delightful city DC is slowly turning into. The neighborhood around there is small houses, apartments further off, and some shopping blocks. It’s marred by a large street which traffic streams through daily and that obscures the quiet ambience of the play otherwise. I’ve vowed to myself to read Love in a Dark Time, Homage to Barcelona, and (connected to Toibin and the project on book illustrations to Trollope which I’ve just finished — a blog this weekend), Amy Tucker’s The Illustration of the Master.

Reprinted by Tucker, it was chosen by James as a frontispiece for A Portrait of Lady, and could serve as frontispiece for Toibin’s The Master.

Ellen

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Ades & Oakes’s Shakespeare; Keenleyside’s Prospero: at the Met DH Opera

Simon Keenleyside as Prospero

Dear friends and readers,

Lest it be thought I’ve gone over-the-top in my praise of so many of these Met Operas transmitted by HB, my reaction to the first act of Ades’s and Oakes’s Tempest was it’s so still, and “there’s nothing doing.” I didn’t like the (to me) screetch-y high notes of Ariel, nor the lack of long melodic arias. The costumes were trying too hard. Keenleyside with his skin tattoos, feathers on his head, was still not US Indian-like; Ariel in pink fluff with ludicrously heavy-make-up – all green eyes; the lovers far too well-fed and smooth, he like something out of When Knighthood was in Flower, she like some fairy tale maiden in the Blue Fairy Book. Robert LePage’s re-building of aspects of La Scala on stage could have made for a disconnect, it added nothing.

What took time to emerge was the focus on an ethical-psychological relationship between Caliban and Prospero: when Prospero loses Ariel, he’s left without consolatory dreams. Ares really gave us an adaptation, serious interpretation of Shakespeare’s play (Enchanted Island was more Dryden/Davenant).

Audrey Luna as Ariel

The play-story does not depart from any of the hinge points of Shakespeare’s; Meredith Oakes’s script brought over to operatic music Shakespeare’s austere visionary core with its intimations of dream aspiration and realities of brute animal creatures and vicious envious evil (Caliban and the Milanese apart from Ferdinand). The young lovers were appropriately innocent for their short beautiful songs and their and all the music was like Debussy (Pelleas et Melisande) — ever there quietly beautiful. After a while the set also turn of the century, with its conceit the people are in an opera house grew tiresome. Yes there was a computer island, soft sea, and we began to see the slow emergence of Prospero’s character as regretful, remorseful, bitter yet in act willing to forgive began. That’s part of the play’s naturalistic miracles.

The last part or act was so moving to me. Keenleyside showed how well he can act: I identified with him as the older person having to give over, to let go, and I liked the presentation of Caliban as an aspect of the solitary Prospero. None of the really powerful lines were omitted, and Prospero’s response to Miranda’s “O brave new world,” was plangently disillusioned.

Alan Oates as Caliban

I’d like to see it again so I could enter into Act 1 from the perspective of what is to come.

As to the interviews, Deborah Voight can carry these off. To some extent she asks real questions about singing technique. You could see in Ades’s eyes a moment’s oh I wish I didn’t have to do this hype but he managed and gave eloquent interviews where he spoke more simply and directly about writing and putting on the opera and his relationships with the singers. He said that he saw himself as their support.

Some reviews: this review particularly insightful and with good photos and stills. See New York Times review. Another review.

Ellen

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This year’s Woody Allen: To Rome With Love

Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) a young husband cut off from his wife, and Anna aka Milly (Penelope Cruz), a prostitute who has substituted for her (2012 To Rome with Love)

Dear friends and readers,

This year’s Woody Allen, To Rome With Love is a pleasing film. It’s cheerful yet melancholy; we are presented with a array of artificial stereotyped couples who play musical chairs among themselves and other characters in scenes of mortification, confusion, anxiety, distress such that I was continually either uncomfortable and or worried what would happen to one or another of them. The central paradigm which repeats over and over is of a character in a situation or saying something which ought to be and is shameful which few around them recognize, and they themselves only intermittently. It seems this is a good thing too or none of us’d survive.

On a searingly hot afternoon to sit in a cool dark theater and watch his cameramen take loving shots of familiar older streets, houses, and stairs in Rome (he must have paid a lot for the Spanish steps), as these paradigms dissolve into the person coping the film manages to convey a world-weary odd relief. The situations become a kind of game, fun even (see the nerve this character has, what that character gets to do or see), and yet incident after incident seems to have roots in a curious despair. The couples all return to those they started out with because they might as well, and anyway life’s chances will surely now and then once again give give all of us an opportunity to fuck, walk, cook, eat and drink with, someone else momentarily more interesting.

Monica (Ellen Page) and Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) trying to cook up a gourmet meal together before they go off to a car to betray Sally, Jack’s live-in girlfriend and Monica’s best friend

It’s not the best Woody Allen film I’ve ever seen, and I’m not going to patiently go through the four sets of couples, two lone male confidants and wise advisor, and one lone female and whore, and their stories. Certainly it’s better than last year’s Midnight in Paris which I thought ludicrously over-praised. Like that, it’s an aging male’s wet dream. Jim often says he cannot understand how it is that when he reads many a male book or sees a male film it’s just filled with these females beautiful or not who are dying to jump into bed with all the males in sight, and when they do, are ever so ecstatically pleased. He seems to be on the wrong planet or these females are on another street from those he walks. It just never happens to him and he’s just like other males. How can this be? This is a film filled with such women. And it’s not really fun when people you are attached to are sexually or otherwise unfaithful.

The real Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) near going off to bed with the famous actor Luca Salta (Antonio Albanese) she’s just met because she got lost (her cell phone fell through a street grate)

A gesture is made to remember the depression engulfing much of the world’s people when Woody’s daughter’s fiancee, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) sticks up for the importance of unions. But mostly everyone is rich and untroubled about how to pay for anything. When Woody nags, tempts, maneuvers his prospective son-in-law’s father into singing operatically in a shower on stage in front of mass crowds at opera houses because only when he sings naked in a shower does his voice soar, there is not a smidgin of difficulty making this happen. A young architect said to be living according to idealistic goals with a female studying for a degree live in a bounteous flat on a lovely little corridor of a street with tons of free time.

Jack buying vegetables and flowers with live-in girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig)

All somehow detached. The reviews of the opera Woody puts on describe him in Italian as an “imbecile” and in character Woody reads this aloud. Because he knows no Italian he is chuffed. Allen also comments self-reflexively on his own film, its internal audiences and maybe us watching it all.

Judy Davis as Phyllis, Woody’s wry patient wife, spending life by his side

He has made some great films recently: genuinely satiric and grave ones, Vick, Christina, Barcelona and You will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. This one seems in some sequences an attempt to get back to his early films with their wacky sequences of events that don’t make logical or realistic sense but are hilarious. The spirit somehow is not high enough to make these moments come off.

John wisely advising Jack with the coliseum in the background

What’s here instead is a kind of witty wry self-dialogue. Woody is there himself and as two other men. Alec Baldwin as John plays a sold-out aging architect who has made tons of money building soulless stadiums and buildings and he takes to following our young architect, Jack, around and telling him from several points of view what a fool Jack’s making of himself, how Monica is a liar, a phony, a poser, pretending to know great literature when he knows famous lines, and when at the close of the film she deserts him without a second’s thought because a role in a play has come through Baldwin nearly says, “what did I say?” Jack returns to Sally and Alec goes back to the street corner where he and Jack first met and walks on his way.

As Leopoldo, Roberto Benigni plays a man made senselessly famous for several weeks, each of his daily doings and small acts made subjects for intense reporting, famous because he’s famous and during much of the movie seeming to try to escape the wild noisy argumentative Italian crowds, though not here

With Monica Nappo as his wife whose runs in her stockings are oo-ed over

He too has a Woody-Allen surrogate, male accompaniment who tells him when he is lonely after the world moves on: it’s better to be miserable and a celebrity than miserable and invisible (or some such words). At least then you didn’t have to wait on line.

Don’t go expecting a lot, just two hours or so of inspiriting humane entertainment. Woody is clearly for us all enjoying enjoying what there is to enjoy from life as far as we can and feels for all those mortified by the laughter and dumb applause of audiences — they, we are as imbecile as he has become. He may have put himself into the movie because he looks so feeble. The father of his prospective son-in-law whom Woody tries to rescue for an opera career is a mortician and fictional Woody keeps telling Phyllis how he has these dreams of death and she keeps saying, nonsense, nonsense lots of time left. (Still he hates “turbulence” periods in planes.) The singing mortician is wiser than his tempter and at the close of the film returns to his niche in his family group in the world.

As I say do all the characters return to where they are comfortable when they started out, e.g., the young couple leaves Rome where they had hoped for some splendid promotion. Antonio just couldn’t hack the pretenses wanted. He doesn’t like football. Anna has her compliant customers (the creme de la creme of society) waiting morning, noon, and night — as I say this is fantasy. The weakest point was the young heterosexual glamor couple, Woody’s supposed daughter, Hayley (Alison Pill) and her fiancee, Michelangelo (not Michael but Mickel) who we began with:

But they are soon put at the margins. You can almost measure the success of an Allen film by where this fatuous normative blond and her escort are in the film (they are central to Midnight in Paris and Matchpoint). I think of them as the wooden romance couple at the center of Walter Scott’s fiction and never can understand why Allen finds it necessary to pander by keeping them among the presences in his films.

When I remember back to the great films by Allen in the past (Love and Death, Stardust Memories, Purple Rose of Cairo, Annie Hall come to mind) I realize we were not bothered by this fake normativeness because Allen was the hero. He is too old now, even too old to pass as this heroine’s father, and he knows it.

I didn’t go with Izzy; she is not drawn to Allen (though she liked the Gemma Jones film). My neighbor from across the street and I have become friends and we went together. She is a woman near my age, and it did seem to me most of the people in the audience (however full) were older people. Woody is winding down and he does make a better film when he has a different type of male than himself (say Javier Bardem) or genuinely believable woman at the center.

Ellen

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In praise of Colm Toibin: un-put-downable

Toibin’s Ireland

Dear friends and readers,

It’s about time I wrote in praise of Colm Toibin, of his biographical and critical essays, of his novels, his biographical fiction, his travel books. I can’t think of any writer as originally thoughtful, perceptive, humane, quietly iconoclastic, informative, absorbing, who reads authors as interesting or simply writes as well so consistently. When I see his name on a list of contributors to any periodical I subscribe to, I go to him first and he doesn’t disappoint. This morning I was lifted out of bleak loneliness (Coping) into a consoled companionableness by his review of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (for New York Review of Books LIX, 8 (May 10, 2012)9-11 where he quoted Larkin in ways that resonated with my feelings, validated them.

Toibin an Irish journalist who comes from precisely the area he has set his story in; he is himself gay or homosexual and he has written out of this perspective more directly at times. While he does write about overt politics, there is much travel writing and three of the novels at least center on this business of the compromises and concessions you must make if you want to stay in a family circle at all, or the difficulties of being in a family setting. He is interested in colonialists and hybrid-identities and literature: Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Indian, French-African, Irish-American. Catholic by faith, liberal-leftist in outlook, sympathetic to revolutionary movements, he’s a gifted writer: delicately powerful stories. He now lives in Dublin.

I can’t list all the essays by him I’ve read, over the years especially on Henry James, Oscar Wilde; his arguments stay with me and I use them in my essays and postings and they become part of my thinking. I’ve not read his short stories, but I have read The Master (a fictional biography of Henry James, see my blog on Kaplan’s biography), The South, Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn. I wish I had read more, and now that my reading time at night is limited I shall have to turn to him during the day.

The South

I remember parts of the book vividly still. Reading The South made me choose to read his The Master and teach Blackwater Lightship and most recently (as my Christmas treat) Brooklyn.

The heroine in The South leaves cold husband and unsympathetic son to make a new life for herself in the south with a wholly unconventional painter who had fought on the left side against Franco; he had been tortured, is now under surveillance and the way he leaves is to retreat to the mountains to live very meagrely (since he has little money and no way of getting any kind of middle class income-producing job). She loves the escape, release, life with him, and herself begins painting. Much on Spanish landscape and customs of a leisured pattern of days. Eventually she gets pregnant by him and years pass and they do improve their (what some would say) squalid living arrangements. Alas, the authorities decide to come after the man again, he is again trying to do some good in the political world. He is again imprisoned, perhaps tortured (I’m not sure on this latter detail), at any rate deeply distraught once more. He has retired from society as a reaction to what he saw in the thirties. (The texts to read here is Orwell’s Reflections of the Spanish Civil War and the Homage to Catalonia). Alas, a horrible accident kills both this man and the new son — we are to see this accident is also wanted; the man wants out and he takes his son with him.

The devastation to our heroine is for a time crushing — though her behavior manifests the same pragmaticism of approach. Some wandering, and meandering and eventually she does return to Ireland, partly lured there by her son by the first husband. Not forgiven (for what should she be forgiven? is the sense of the text) nor forgiving (they are not sorry for what they are), nonetheless, her older family finds a place for her to live in Ireland.

Meanwhile (I’ve left this part out) her career as an artist has gone on quietly flourishing with paintings recording her sense of Spain and experience. She has lived an authentic life and continues to do so until the book quietly closes and at whatever price she had to pay in others’ refusal to countenance this since they did not.

The reverse is true of the heroine of Brooklyn. Indeed the slightly shocking close shows the heroine returning to Ireland and her originally intended husband because 1) she had promised to, and under the stress of circumstances been pressured into literally marrying the first lover, he having surmised she might just not come back when she sees improved living standards and freedom — he had been her only choice; no jobs anywhere that are fulfilling or money-making for such as someone from her family); and 2) the authority figures in Brooklyn discover she has married elsewhere and threatened to expose her; she knows she will become a pariah because this is the way such people as a group work, so home she goes, leaving then the man who had come to love her in his compromised way (he needs her, she fits in &c&c).

I remember the devastatingly accurate assessment of her relationship with the mother, used and she knows using her. We had been thinking the heroine was better than all these, but she is exposed as just like everyone else. And we are to feel for her, deeply feel for us all in her case.

The heroine in The South escaped all this; hers is the reverse story. But she did for much of her life live hard, in poverty, alone, her beloved man tortured, hounded and escaped through killing herself and she ends in this cottage provided for her, silent again (as the kind of talk in her Irish family is once more irrelevant to anything that matters to her for real).

But the meaning inherent in The South and Brooklyn is the same, the perspective out of which they come and the ultimate message about the obstacles to living an authentic life.

I love candour and hard-truth telling in a book; the unexpected ending exhilarated me. So many falsely easy and happy pseudo-optimistic stories are told; rather than give hope, they irritate and depress me as having the effect of throwing the blame on people who don’t do well. On the the other hand, wanting to think very well of the heroine, Eilis Lacey, when she was in the very final pages of the book obviously willing to overthrow her Brooklyn husband, Tony, and marry the new Irish man, Jim, who owned a pub and was admired by all, in a situation where she saw that instead of being ignored as the useless superfluous second sister, she would get a better job than in NYC (the competition in NYC was too keen for her to rate an office job), I liked her less. I was anxious for her because I thought it would matter to her so much to lose the beloved Tony, but when I was shown how she would give this up, I acceded it was truthful but cared less.

I loved the portrait of the mother who knew or had enough to suspect all along
her daughter had formed new ties in Brooklyn but ignored it, pretended not to
know in order to pressure the girl into lying and staying. But when the girl was
to go because her marriage in Brooklyn was found out, instead of showing affection, the mother shut the door on her. Here we see how people really value one another and what for. Now she can’t get from the girl what she wanted: not just a companion but someone who this pub owner would marry so she the mother would be admired in public.

On the immigrant patterns: I grew up in the south east Bronx mostly, in a slum which at first was heavily Irish but by the time my parents moved out was heavily black. The patterns of Irish life were to me no different than the working class Italian life I saw in Richmond Hill, a neighborhood near the one we moved to. I didn’t dislike them; they seemed to me American catholic working class by the time I was in my teens, only on the surface different from middle to upper middle class Jewish life in Kew Gardens where we did move. The Kew Gardens neighborhood I did hate and had a hard time getting used to: much snobbery, ostentation, and we lived in a 3 bedroom apartment on the ‘low end’ of life there. My name, Ellen, is partly the result of my mother imitating the names she heard around her in the Bronx. (It’s also the name of the mother in Gone with the Wind, which however she denied knowing and said it was just the people around her. I doubt she would have called me Colleen though as my mother was Jewish and that would have been gonig too far.)

Toibin sets the two other novels I’ve read by him partly or wholly in Ennisworthy. It’s where he comes from. And he has a poignant statement about missing it (boyhood memories) in Blackwater Lightship.

The Brooklyn New York parts were truth to life. My mother’s people lived in Brooklyn and for about 2 years (one year when I was small) I lived in Brooklyn and did on occasion visit these relatives growing up. The climate would seem extreme after the British Isles.

I read with an intense anxiety on behalf of Eilis, worried for her as succumbing to pressure. I had to peek ahead to assure myslf she broke away and returned. But when I experienced why and how my feelings for her changed dramatically. But this is a truthful probable portrait. It showed me patterns in my family’s reactions to me I’ve seen repeatedly.

Blackwater Lightship throws yet another permutation and light on this central experience — as does The Master, only then the partial escapee is James. This novel is about a homosexual young man who returns to his family for a weekend just before he died. They had nothing to do with him until then because they didn’t want to know or allow anyone else to know he lived a gay life. We see all their estrangements from one another too.

It’s been criticized for not centering more emphatically on the issue of homosexuality, even marginalizing it. To my mind that Toibin presents Decclan’s sexual orientation, and condition as another important element in the life of the family, not more devastating or central than say the father’s death (Mr Breen) or Lily’s long time adjusting to being alone and her giving her two children to her mother, Dora Devereux while she coped is one of its strengths.

It’s realistic: no false sentiment about family life, but that biological ties are there and for reasons that are hard to explain pragmatically except that people turn to families and families take them in as a matter of survival; there is no alternative to rely on so people come through for one another most of the time. Not all. Homeless people not uncommon. People living away from families and managing to support themselves and find company and worlds with friends happens a good deal.

Still the family pattern is the dominant one whether in a modern country and culture like the US or traditional one like Zimbabwe and India (there we have an arranged marriage and couple who come to live in the US.

Key theme of this and two other of his books, The South and The Heather Blazing (I’ve read about it), and his fictional biography of Henry James called The Master are The key themes, “are the compromises and concessions involved in belonging to a family and in calling somewhere “home”.

The DVD cover of the TV movie adaptation

Three complex female characters: Helen (now married to Hugh O’Doherty), her mother, Lily Breen, and the grandmother, Dora Devereux. All three have similar characters: proud, standoffish, determined with the ability and knowhow of domineering, running a situation, self-contained, self-possessed, but like most people wanting affection, support, and Helen shown as having sensitivities like her older son, Cathal; Manus has mean bullying personality from the get-go, huge ego. You might say it’s about the problem of mothering; by no means does this come more naturally to women than men though the task is forced on them by social arrangements and expectations.

There is no easy reconciliation. The family’s fumbling attempts at change are set against the natural process of erosion that is eating away the coastline close to the family home in Cush. The liminal space of the beach as a setting for the beginning of Helen and Lily’s reconciliation, and the novel ends with the muted triumph of Lily spending the night at Helen’s home after returning the now severely ill Declan to the hospital in Dublin.

It’s a delicately powerful story of a family’s failure to face difficult feelings and their stubborn refusal to admit need (especially the grandmother). He through them delve into memories with a visceral, unsparing depiction: main character through whom we see action is Helen: snapshots of the family’s fraught past are filtered through her memory.

When Helen was 11, she had had to deal with her father’s illness and death virtually alone – she was left with her 8-year-old brother at her grandmother’s house for six months while her mother nursed her father, or tried to. Gradually Helen withdrew from everyone except Declan into a watchful guardedness. She “trained herself to be equal to things, whatever they would be.” But her defenses against the pain of the past are a barrier against present life. She mothered Decclan, came into his room at night the way she does for Cathal and Manus. Helen’s memory of the day before her father’s funeral when she arranged on her parents’ bed a suit of his clothes complete with underwear, tie, socks, hat, and shoes, then lay down beside the father figure she had made.

There is no father figure here; Hugh kept from us; Helen and Decclan’s father died young, we see almost nothing of the grandfather. We have instead Decclan and his two friends, three male characters match three female ones: the strong Paul (a counterpart to Helen) who tells us of his marriage with Francois, and Larry, who has had bitter experiences with his family about his homosexuality and shows us the hypocrisy of the world, but is bright and cheerful in temperament and gets along very well with the grandmother, planning architectural changes to the house we know she’ll never do, and she and he know it, but he does teach her to drive a little a stick-shift car.

The theme is not coming out but coming to terms with oneself. And humour — evolving from camp Larry’s unlikely affinity with the grandmother and from her own sardonic wit–leavens a sombre load. Each has a story:

Larry tells how he came out to his family on the six o’clock news. Paul tells how he and his mate were married by a priest in a traditional Catholic ceremony.

Granny Dora tells how she got the switchblade knife that’s in her apron pocket. Helen’s mother, Lily, who fled into a fast-lane business career and a huge designer house she occupies alone, tells Helen about her father’s last days.

Then we get Declan’s graphic deterioration. The family members and friends do not avoid him

It is about homosexual man regarded as other and I understand the frustration of some gay critics because Decclan is kept at a distance from us: he seems dependent, unable to make a permanent relationship like Paul, acting out as a child to Paul. But there’s revisiting the same theme over and over: Toibin has written novels focusing on a gay man, the one I’ve read is The Master, and Henry James lived away from his family, estranged. Looking at otherness is kept away to some extent

The sense of place, here, is germane and its adjoining strand–close to a disintegrating cliff, caught in the reiterative sweep of the lighthouse–permeate the book with an elemental atmosphere.

Beautiful spare graceful prose: measured and restrained as a Victorian memoir yet poetic in precision-”extraordinary skill for rendering time and place. This quiet novel achieves its effects gradually and with subtlety

The presence of Decclan’s homosexual friends influence the behavior of his family to one another and him as he lays dying in Blackwater Lightship, and we discussed pretty fully of the six main characters, three women, daughter who is now a mother, Helen, mother, Lily, and grandmother, Dora; and we went briefly the three men: Decclan, Paul and Larry.

Decclan is dependent, not strong, looks for help from friends. He has no permanent relationship with a significant other unlike Paul and perhaps Larry. We don’t learn much about his private life for the past years. He is the person in the book dying about whom we learn least. He is kept away from us, except to give us these graphic descriptions of his suffering as perceived by the other characters. Who does he seem to depend upon? Paul.

Paul knows what to do; he finds the emergency room to bring Decclan back to at the end. He is in charge. And he and Helen, as a similarly strong character exchanges stories. Thing is they are not that strong: they need someone depending on them. We see that it’s Helen’s husband Hugh who has the friends, who is the open more giving person, really there, and she needs that. Paul’s partner. What is his story? Francoise who was an only child and needed to be married to have security. Waiting for Paul to return.

Larry, you might call him the comedian, but he’s getting through life that way. Let’s look a little more carefully at the passage where he tells his parents and family he is gay: he gets involved with public politics and finds he appears on the six o’clock news as a gay person, which his family was watching. What is the hard thing? Not the actual event or even the retelling, but the reaction in the room to when he tells of his present love relationships with a nearby family where the men lead overtly heterosexual lives.

The book is named after a lighthouse that no longer exists. Helen and Lily are talking. We don’t learn much about Decclan’s private life nor about him directly; when we learn about Larry’s life it’s indirect and the powerful stuff is about here and now and yet what is not there matters; so too Paul’s relationship with Francoise. About how important memories are and the intangible invisible lives we don’t show publicly shape the public. At the close of the edition I ordered into the bookstore, we have Toibin’s statement about his book: he gains meaning and solace through reliving his memories, and bringing them alive again.

There are eight chapters with some of the stories (memories plus present time) achieving a kind of quiet climax in the 7th, with 1st as prologue, Helen at home, and 8th as the denouement as they prepare to and bring Decclan back to the hospital and Helen brings Lily back to her house. her mother has never been there before. For those working on Blackwater Lightship for this coming journal entry: a series of inset stories or memories embedded into the narrative. People talking with Helen present, Helen and Paul confiding. Then Helen and Decclan’s story from when their father dies We see grandmother and grandfather watching TV and arguing over what they see. Then Larry’s story, Lily’s story, Paul’s story (Toibin a Catholic and has written about Catholicism in travel book on Barcelona central here); Helen’s story (Decclan the spoilt favored child as the boy). Back to Lily’s story; how Blackwater Lightship as a long gone lighthouse is central; Helen’s story again; Helen’s portrait of Lily.

Our cat (Ian) facing forward

The cats — They run away and to the Grandmother this is a bad loss. Cats are affectionate clinging creatures; Lily’s story again; told to Helen, talking of grandmother and past, signals some understanding

Book about the rhythms of the night, and how people cope with death: the Grandmother turns to these mediums who feed people’s desire to reach the dead. A dark theme of redemptive power of death runs through all his books.

The comfort in The Master is James got to live his own life to some extent. He lives as the heroine in The South, only because he has money, property and connections he manages far better than our heroine and ends up with his measure of independence, until of course he’s done in at the end by terrible sickness and death and again finds himself taken over. We see how he lives a life apart, the price of it and the achievement he managed by remaining apart.

I find I don’t have separate notes on The Master, but I do on an essay he wrote for the LRB: The Importance of Aunts. in his usual cagey or elusive way Toibin manages to say what he pretends would be “too crude” to say: especially with respect to James. The problem with Austen’s getting rid of the useless mother (which Toibin does connect to her relationship with her own) is the caricatures she creates are in danger of being taken non-seriously; you can laugh at Lady Betram, which would be to misunderstand or ignore her effect on Fanny Price.

I particularly like how Toibin deals with James’s family: he says how James loved his mother, but in the same breathe, how he kept away from her as it was all too painful to contemplate or let touch (and destroy) him. In Washington Square despite the understatement and careful avoidance of offering the readers ways of not reading what’s in front of them, her heroine has to cope with a loathsome father, a morally idiotic scheming aunt and her own pent-up sexuality. Her nobility comes from her enduring steadfastly being alone in the world. She escapes the fate of Isobel Archer because she knows how to feel and is not to be dissuaded by those around from to violate herself.

She is then a cynosure for James himself.

On Austen’s use of aunts: Austen feels free, on the other hand, to make Lady Catherine de Bourgh both imperious and comic, her wealth and power serving to make her ridiculous and unworthy rather than impressive; but she is not meant merely to amuse us, or to show us an aspect of English society that Austen thought was foolish. She is an aunt who does not prevail; her presence in the book succeeds in making Darcy more individual, less part of any system. Her function is to allow her nephew, who refuses to obey her, a sort of freedom, a way of standing alone that will make him worthy of Elizabeth ….

From the 1983 BBC Mansfield Park: Mrs Norris (Anna Massey) berating Fanny (Sylvestre le Tousel) in front of the whole family

The reader is invited, then, to dislike Mrs Norris for her cruelty and to admire Fanny for her forbearance. Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin sees Mrs Norris as `one of the great villains of literature’; Tony Tanner thought she was `one of Jane Austen’s most impressive creations and indeed one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction’. All this is clear, at times rather too clear. What isn’t clear is what the reader should feel about the other aunt, Lady Bertram, mistress of Mansfield Park. Tomalin dislikes her. `Fanny’s experience at Mansfield Park is bitter as no other childhood is in Austen’s work. Her aunt, Lady Bertram, is virtually an imbecile; she may be a comic character, and not ill-tempered, but the effects of her extreme placidity are not comic …

Just one from James: This sexualisation of an aunt figure is what gives the book its power. James radically destabilises the category, moves Madame Merle from being Isabel’s protector, who stands in for her mother without having a mother’s control, to being someone who seeks to damage and defeat her

More generally: The idea of the family as anathema to the novel in the 19th century, or the novel being an enactment of the destruction of the family and the rise of the stylish conscience, or the individual spirit, has more consequences than the replacement of mothers by aunts. As the century went on, novelists had to contemplate the afterlives of Elizabeth and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, had to deal with the fact that these novels made families out of the very act of breaking them. It was clear that, since something fundamental had already been done to the idea of parents, something would also have to be done to the idea of marriage itself, since marriage was a dilution of the autonomy of the individual protagonist. There is a line that can be drawn between Trollope and George Eliot and Henry James: all three dramatise the same scene, each of them alert to its explosive implications. What they are alert to is the power of the lone, unattached male figure in the novel, someone with considerable sympathy, who moves unpredictably, who keeps his secrets and ego intact …

Photo of Henry James as the master, late in life

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Toibin’s greatness also lies in his quiet unassuming style. He gets so much in
and yet does not seem to stretch or have to overwrite at all. It’s part of what makes the novels seem so truthful.

He teaches we must find and live out our own identities at the same time as he compassionates those who do not as the cost can be so high.

From the movie adaptation of Blackwater Lightship

I need to read his Homage to Barcelona next. See the LRB archive for treasures.

Ellen

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Prime Suspect 7: Full Circle

Helen Mirren, final shots: walking quietly away from a lifetime of work

Dear friends and readers,

I have now watched this last mini-series (two episodes of well over an hour each) and found it did not disappoint. The final act shows Jane Tennison understandably faltering before her own need for companionship with a girl as she imagines she once was (as her father lays dying and she is made to understand it’s time to retire) but then upon recognizing that Penny Philips (Laura Greenwood as the adolescent girl who seemed to so cling to Jane, admire her) had to have been the deliberate murderer of her friend, grimly obtains the evidence from an interrogation once more.

The full circle is that Prime Suspect has dealt with so many larger social issues: hatred of women, of black people, of immigrants (or racism), exploitation and abuse of homosexual men, boys; of the disparity of rich and poor, drug culture, sheer crazed psychopathy, colonialisms. It’s time to get in touch with our apparently more or less sane adult close-to-home issues again. Here one Sally is her parents’ world, she is champion of all, well-liked, outgoing cheerful as yet. They wanted to end in the inner circle where the larger problems first take shape.

Jane and Mr Tennison

In the first half I was almost unbearably moved. More than in “Scent of Darkness” (where Mirren as Jane’s affair with Stuart Wilson as Patrick is made nearly as important as the events of the police story), Jane is now brought to the center. Her drinking (she is now seen as alcoholic — her drinking is occurring not just in the lonely nights), her loneliness, her dying father (Frank Findlay brought back) are made the parallel plot for the police story where she also finds herself increasingly shut off. The father tells her what she does is not for him (she wants an expensive second opinion, cannot face he is dying and accept it) but for herself. We are to see that goes for why she has spent her life the way she has: she has felt genuinely useful.

She looks back on her life and finds she is not at all satisfied with what she did and what she has become. Need I say how I identified with this? I do think as a feeling it is common — a motivation for many an autobiography where people try to retrieve the loss and justify their lives to themselves. She is alcoholic and must control her drinking, goes to alcoholic anonymous where she sees Tom Ball. He has and she is at long last facing retiring: what she will do with herself she doesn’t know. She is not well enough to continue.

Talking together, much older, in non-pretentious cafeteria

A beautiful thing is they did get a few of the actors to return who were in the first programs. Frank Finlay was her father in 1991. He and she do look alike: the same gene pool comes out in their facial features. Tom Bell who was her rival-enemy Otley is back and we have an example of that truth that knowing one another over years in itself makes for bonds through memory; he too has slid into alcoholism we are asked to take it. A crushing loss is he gets involved in an altercation that Jane herself started and ratcheted up, and following hard upon her father’s death, Otley is killed. In fact this episode had far more moments of sheer panic than most of them as people saw their intimate assumptions and needs and lives gone haywire.

A note: Brendon Coyle who is given the difficult role of the masochistic Mr Bates in Downton Abbey is Jane’s boss (who tells her it’s time, she must retire) and he is very good in this role — his earlier career is in fact in detective, male-oriented programs: he is so differently photographed from Downton Abbey and Cranford that at first I did not recognize him.

The second half moved into the police procedural mode and this last time we had no larger issue but really an exposure of family pathologies, the lies schools use to cover up what teenagers’ real lives are, and at the close Jane finding she’d been fooled once again. She had not seen that it was Penny who killed her friend, Sally, partly because Sally was going to bed with Penny’s father, a person high in the school hierarchy and under much stress, Sean Philips (Stephen Tomkinson). This series has four sets of parents (family groups): Sally’s parents to whom the unbelievable must be face: their innocent daughter, has been having sex with a young black man, with a teacher, become pregnant and is now dead, gone forever. Their lives desolate, stunned, they must start again:

The first shock, the mother (Katy Murphy) comforted by a black man sitting next to her so calm

Penny’s where the mother is again stunned by the ordinary: her husband having an affair with her daughter’s friend, that daughter gone out of control:

Neither pair understands. The third family group is the young black man and his sister, and her child whom Sally had dumped herself on. He, violent because afraid (the chase scene occurred over his flight), his sister, his mainstay. The last set of parents or family-friend group is Jane Tennison’s: her mother never seen (ah), but father and sister there and towards the end a niece; Otley, killed, and yes the last police group she departs from.

The particular characters of this episode in the second half begin to realize what has happened, grow angry, bitter, and finally cope, Jane manages to control herself, curb the heavy drinking during the day; we are probably to applaud or feel her “confession” of drinking was right; for myself I saw her as again yielding to what she had to yield. Her sternness as a last turn towards the father who betrayed his student, daughter, wife, school, was appropriate though; towards Penny too, who in fact killed, followed the wrong impulse of resentment, envy and now is at a bleak loss.

Nothing lachrymose — the sadness of the first half was justified. And not overdone. And the bewilderment, anger and finally stoicism of the second simply spot on as what would or could be given what people had succumbed to.

And I loved the close. Sally’s parents saying goodbye to her, the father thanking her, she giving the cross to the mother, the two seen from the back clinging together. The office is giving Jane a final party and all are getting drunk and whooping it up. Does she go in there (as she did in the first episode’s triumph). No. She puts on her dark coat and walks sturdily, bravely into the night.

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I liked these moments of quick sudden insight throughout the series

The feature attempted to have scenes from across the 15 years the series had been filmed. They rightly did congratulate themselves upon having made a serious drama with humane and relevant import, and absorbed us all the while. Entertained too: how I loved her affair with Stuart Wilson, her getting back, the excitement of her life, entered into her despair, her affairs, her decisions (as not to have a child), her aging, her peculiar strong humanity, decent values.

I’m really glad I bought the whole series. I could not have seen it properly otherwise. You do need to see all the episodes and you need to see them in the order they were done. This is Jane’s story, her life and the life of her police world as seen through her perceptions. As I told a friend on facebook, I don’t identify with Jane Tennison’s power but I do all her emotional stances and thus love the show and go to sleep feeling better for having watched her. This was why I so loved Poldark and the Poldark books: the stance of the hero was the same as this heroine: a loving renegade.

Ellen

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Atul Gawande: realities of medicine hidden and mostly misunderstood

Dear friends and readers,

Another blog where I’m turning my lecture notes into a blog for my students and in the hope other readers involved in some aspect of medicine (and which of us is not?) will find them of interest.

I begin with Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, his introduction, a summary and exemplification of his book’s major arguments: Medicine is a strange and disturbing business: it is messy, uncertain and surprizing. Is that true of other sciences? Yes. Are there other applied uses of science where what happens is very often unpredictable? We have had one this term: the NASA shuttle. John Harrison’s invention of watch that could tell what longitude a shiop is at. We see him aboard ship showing how hard it is to cope with knowing this abstract placement.

Gawande opens with anecdote (pp. 3-5). The doctors were frightened, meant to help a young man shot through the buttocks, cut him open, what damage was done was done by them; they couldn’t explain how it happened. Then the case of boy in danger of death. He, Gawande, had to guess. They didn’t know how gravity would affect what they were doing (p. 6). Lee Tran. They guessed right.

Medicine is an imperfect science, diagnosis and offering medication are ways of investigating what’s wrong with someone (p. 7). The stories in a sense all exemplify this idea. Book’s sections organized thematically to highlight sub-points he wants to make: doctors are fallible: they have to learn and on patients and they “go bad.” Much mystery and many unknowns in medicine and struggles of what to do about these (back pain with no physical explanation that drives a person wild; nausea won’t go away and is literally killing her): we see that evolution has made a creature at odds with the demands of our modern lives and society. Then uncertainty itself driving the whole experience, shaping it.

The major flaw in book: “While people continue to bear the high cost of medical care, negligence and over-commercialization, Gawanade offers analysis of intangible though important dimensions dimensions through stories and leaves out of his discussion any ethical burden on the above issues affecting the nation and society: our attitudes towards one another because of race, sex, ethnicity, and the kind of illness we show up with.” “He prefers to throw dust away from medical profession by called medical science ‘imperfect’.” It could be called a distraction.

The candid stories conceal a biased and conciliatory analysis that favors a gainful status quo of practitioners; the way medicine is practiced today (in the US and elsewhere) where good health benefits are distributed like cookies to certain high incomes and luckily placed people and age groups.”

On the other hand they are candid and for many they open up cracks in our own attitudes towards medicine and doctors that are unreal and dangerous. He is smart, learned, and gives us a chance to think. What medicine is despite the plethora of programs remains mostly hidden and misunderstood.

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Part 1: Fallibility

Atul Gawande

Essay 1: Education of the Knife (pp. 11-34): it’s people doctors must practice upon.

He is frank about how hard it is to learn. I’ve read this kind of thing where the doctor/nurse/medical technician shows him or herself trying to put in an IV. What makes this different is he shows himself trying to put in a scalpel, in the center of someone’s body. The reader pays attention.

What are the motives of someone who does this? Enjoyment of power. Darwin was originally going to be a doctor; his father sent him to one of the best medical schools on the earth at the time, at the University of Edinburgh (also good were Paris, some in Italy). He shuddered in horror: no anesthesia; he found it particularly hard to take how the poor were treated and also children, particularly the children of the poor. Gawande gaps in awe (p 15), exhilarating the power (p 16)

Real experience daily is of ordinary things all the time: someone gets a screw in her leg from a chair and can’t wrest herself free, (p 18)

He doesn’t tend to see hand-eye coordination genes per se as central. What you need is the ability to practice, practice, practice. The genius or talent is the one which leads you to practice (pp. 18-21)

It is hard to talk to patients about this (p 23) People won’t let you learn on their family or friends if they know about it (pp. 29-30). He didn’t let a resident learn on his child. Truth is the wealthy and well-connected wriggle out; he’s for setting up a system insofar as you can, where choices are offered or born equally (p. 33) How much should trainees be allowed to participate? (Is there anyone in the classroom who feels or knows that a physician-in-training did something and the result, while not fatal, is not so good?)

Introduces important theme or insight which carries throughout the book: the way to eliminate errors is not to demonize individuals; it’s to study a system, a practice, a habit, a group and see what patterns of errors happen and then see how to eliminate them. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone. No matter how hard you try not to. Gawande shows they tend to be of the same kind: like misreading the machine which puts someone under anesthesia because the companies put the controls on the front differently; like copying out prescriptions.

What to do? Get after the companies; make doctors use preset prescriptions in computers (that is shown to work better because then they are not misread, another systemic problem). We want to believe in some hero and then we sue him; he’s just another “flawed human” being in a team, in a subculture.

We see the team that learns quicker and does better, is one where people cooperate, are not competitive or domineering, and we see why: they are really a team (p 29): trust, getting people to do their best in security.

It is hard for someone to adjust to and face your own fallibility.

Essay 2: The Computer and the Hernia Factory (pp. 35-46): what makes for needed excellence

Gawande begins with examples of how approaching medicine from a systemic point of view, relying on machines can help eliminate certain kinds of errors. The problem: people are mistakenly discharged; one reason is misreading the computer printout. Machine is better at it (p. 37).

Well, there are hospitals where doctors do nothing but hernias. They get good at it. Repetition changes the way you think. Is that to be better? Depends, maybe in the case of this sort of operation. Doctors do rely on intuition too; a lot of doctoring is sizing you up. Do we eyeball our groceries to determine how much they should cost us?

The problem in the book of celebrating technical virtuosity. Is Gawande too much into this technical virtuosity? Our films (Wit, The Doctor) stress the need for humanity. Jason a technique freak; so too Kelekian; alas so too was Vivian Bearing when she taught poetry. All avoiding the human. The human is so painful and so uncertain. It’s hard to make friends. I’m one of those who goes to the library and finds books as friend.

Essay 3: When Doctors Make Mistakes (pp 47-74): again doctors must learn on people and how to bring down the number of mistakes

Gawande is concerned to show us that medical error is not fundamentally a problem of bad or crooked or inadequate or corrupt doctors. He tells the story of his bad judgement is one that has been excerpted again and again. It’s brave of him; it also probably precludes some other person getting very mad at him (he can’t make enemies telling of his own failure).

I talk a lot to my dentist. Dentists are doctors. For about 15 years, maybe a bit more I’ve had very bad troubles with my teeth. He’s a nice man, honest, a good dentist. When I told him about this book and quoted the line, “It was a clean kill” (p. 61), he said to me people he knows have said this to him. One surgeon says you are unlikely to carry on through a life doing surgery without killing someone. I said, “is that true, do you think?” Well, he said, he’s lost people’s teeth when they didn’t need to lose them. He feels bad when people lose their teeth unnecessarily.

Gawande’s pride was at stake. He wanted to do it himself

While I don’t think suit prevents errors, and agree that fear of suit can make errors, I disagree with the inference some may take away from this chapter that we ought not to have suit (pp. 55-58).

It’s the only place we as patients have to fight a lack of autonomy. It’s a crude highly fallible mechanism which is screwed up by the adversarial court system (and you get money for pain and injury, not from mistakes; juries award much bigger sums when outcome back regardless of whether there was a mistake or some egregious misconduct as in the stories Gawande tells in the essay called “When Good Doctors Go Bad.”

I lived in England for a time where you can’t sue; patients have less rights in custom; custom and norms are more significant in determining how people behave than law. Laws forbid things; they don’t tell us what to do, but what not to do. The language is sometimes phrased as the law allows you this or that, but it’s felt as what is not permitted. Scotland you have to prove a tort; here only pain and injury.

Would they discuss their errors if we didn’t have lawsuits? I don’t think so (p 58). Nonetheless, I agree demonizing errors is a bad idea. As doctors are not gods, so they are not demons.

M&M: Mortality and Morbidity: with all its evasions, it’s what they have and it needs to be protected. Let us remember lawyers make money from suits. He agrees it’s inadequate and shabby. The individuals don’t take responsibility; the doctor does not want to see himself as part of team or system. There’s the problem of collegiality and the problem that you fear someone will accuse you of bad or poor practice. But they do look into errors; the person is known to have made it, and his or her career is on the line.

Probably the most important part of this book is the argument that “people err frequently and in predictable patterned ways.” We know this but do not act upon it except when something seems singularly risky: like airplane flight. People don’t have wings. He tells the case of anesthesiology where error was brought down to a tiny percentage of what it had been when the systems and patterns of behaviors were studied (pp 64-67).

I notice that one cause of the young woman’s death can be said to be an unwillingness to spend money on new machines that make no money. It cost to replace the monitors with better ones (p 67). That takes money out of the budget which individuals can glom up. City of Alexandria is always very unwilling to replace a stop sign with a red/green light. They say people don’t like red/green lights, but they also often add the $90,000 bill or so these things cost. Only after a number of accidents at bad corners, do you see a red/green light go up.

Doctors should still work to utter capacity; bodily harm at stake. Effort makes; diligence, attention, care (p 73).

Gawande did err; he did not make the most of the hand of cards he’d been dealt with. Not always easy to see what is the best thing to do.

Essay 4: Nine Thousand Surgeons (pp. 75-86): people go to conferences to be with their tribe.

A considerably lighter essay. Time our for a little humor that teaches us something. What do professionals go to conferences for? A good question. Feynman distrusts conferences. He says they are mostly for display, political networking, personal aggrandizement. There are things sold which are worthless; little original research or ideas for real anywhere. Maybe so. Still people go and he went too. Anyone here ever gone to a convention or conference of people engaged in the same endeavor or having the same interests?

You go to be validated; to talk to people in your community like you. To share feelings and thoughts. The conversations on the bus. You are among your particular tribe. A tribe not linked by genes or biology. If nothing original, a lot of development. You are in for conning of course and have to figure out what’s valuable and what hype, what personal aggrandizement sheerly and what interesting.

You can experience the occasional illuminating or just so moment: the telling paper, film, procedure, encounter. For him it was the man with the real books of thought (pp. 81-82) in the midst of frivolous nonsensical gadgets and freebee give-aways.

Essay 5: When Good Doctors Go Bad (pp. 88-106): the problem of inadequate means to stop bad doctors from practicing; the lack of help for them.

Story of Hank Goodman is memorable: he began as intensely caring and ambitious and became “burned out.” Had had enough.Surprisingly common and no one with the power to do anything acted (p. 95). Gawande says there is an honorable reason: “they don’t have the heart.” Well what about the patients. He does not include how people fear for themselves. He says the intentions of everyone are good. Are they? (p. 95). Goodman was depressed. Most whitewashing moment in the book.

People just beneath this doctor in the best position to know (p. 96). Some brave enough to steer patient away.

But it’s brave and decent of Gawande to bring this up; to tell this story and how the man who started this effective clinic could not get monetary support. We should look to what someone does and not what they didn’t do altogether.

He names 4 types of abusive behavior, p 100: persistent poor anger control or abusive behavior; bizarre or erratic behavior (which people get away with when in high positions); transgression of proper professional boundaries (ditto — mostly having to do with sex); and the familiar marker or sign of a disproportionate number of lawsuits or complaints.

What we really are: 32 percent of general population has some serious mental disorder (1/3) be it depression, mania, panic, psychosis or addiction.

Gawande would like readers to stop being ready to view doctors as sociopaths; they are struggling human beings too. I wonder if we are able to look at ourselves.

Do you think people prefer a system of don’t ask, don’t tell? Well which people. Doctors may prefer it, but do patients? (P. 103) There are people who don’t want to know about their sickness, who don’t want to be asked to participate in the decision-making process for real. I don’t prefer don’t ask, don’t tell. But this is a character trait with me. I want to know. I feel stability and safety can only rely on truth. I may be wrong. In life I’ve seen where I have been.

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Part 2: Mystery

Essay 6: Full Moon Friday the Thirteenth (pp. 109-114): our intuitive thinking wrong

People see patterns and meanings where there is none; do a study and discover that our intuition is wrong. There is no connection, but as we experience the misery or trauma, we persist in remembering the previous time we experienced it and its details and trying to find some pattern.

Essay 7: The Pain Perplex (pp. 115-129): suffering because and out of things outside our control.

Have you ever had a pain and everyone said “it’s in your head”? Gawande is here to agree it’s in your head but that does not make it any the less real. Have you ever had a pain and no one could find an explanation for it and dismissed your pain? Gawande writes of the common condition of ” a patient who has chronic pain without physical findings to account for it.”

It’s common for doctors to dismiss them as cranks, not real, needing psychiatric care (“whinging”). Such people go to acupuncturist and alternative medicine.

Gawande is here to believe you and say there are some other scientifically medical people who will try to help you. The story of Rowland Scott Quinlan (pp. 115-118). Story not atypical but common.

Theoretically the problem is the mechanistic theory we adhere to about medicine. We have to find a physical agent to push something
before we will believe it’s been pushed. Gawande leaves out psychology: people don’t want to allow this; it’s inconvenient; they only want to take seriously what is physically there.

Underlying this story is an argument that psyche is as real and significant as soma, e.g., panic disorder. It’s real. But it gets no respect. It’s hard to get an etiology. Gawande is for resorting to drugs if they work — and also operations. After all, he’s a surgeon. Health is a complicated state. People aren’t faking it if misery in the job or marriage or wherever is giving them acute pain (P. 128).

Gate-control theory of pain has been replaced by a new theory which seems to be accurate: the brain is not a bell you pull with a string, and the idea of to stop the bell from reacting to the pull (that is find distractions and other things to make you ignore pain, though it’s true that people in certain professions and situations will ignore pain longer: ballet dancers and men who escaped with their lives from battle even with terrible maiming injuries.

Pain comes from the brain, and it doesn’t need a physical stimulus necessarily. This makes pain political because it demonstrates the source is social arrangements. If we want to eliminate the pain, we need to change the social arrangements.

Essay 8: A Queasy Feeling (pp. 130-145): the uses of nausea.

A woman friend has told me that there are people who “don’t believe” in this condition of a woman during pregnancy; they deny that near fatal vomiting can occur in some pregnancies.

Parents have an adversarial as well as supportive relationship with children. There is a conflict between the interests of the mother and child when it comes to childbirth. Nature does not care for the individual but species. Until 20th century childbirth was often fatal; it’s still dangerous. Explanation comes from evolution: pelvus we walk on is not quite big enough to accommodate large brain which developed a little later. We are claptrap machine. Horses have trouble too.

So here is a place where natural selection has developed erratically: some foods safe for adults are unsafe for embryos; pregnancy sickness may be evolved to reduce an embryo’s exposure to natural toxins. Common morning sickness does usually end by the end of the first trimester. It’s said that women who are pregnant naturally prefer bland foods; I can say that when I was pregnant the second time I stopped drinking wine – and other liquors. I couldn’t. They just made me sick. This unhappy state ended upon giving birth.

I don’t know that motion sickness is relevant here; he does not want to go into the adversarial nature of the symbiosis.

Story of how woman endured this killing pregnancy: she did have someone to care for her; she had money and health care; many women would not and many would not endure this. They’d have an abortion. It was advised but she said she was Catholic. The doctors also attached her to a device that made her hear a heartbeat much louder than it really was. I wonder if the nurse did that voluntarily or was it imposed on this woman (p 139)

Gawande goes into the phenomena of nausea and tries to explain why people dislike it so. Our understanding of this is primitive. Pharmaceutical companies make millions of dollars selling drugs. Best way to cope is start treating the condition when it’s mild. So habit comes in here

Larger interesting issue about suffering Do we do enough about suffering? The problem is when we see someone suffering we look at it as something to test and then look to see if there is a practical thing we can do. Instead of trying to cope with the suffering. Nausea is one condition where we are forced to deal with the suffering itself because people really dislike nausea.

Essay 9: “Crimson Tide” (pp. 146-161): the blush

This one interesting because physiology is clearly intertwined with someone’s character. They are not separate facets of existence which people might tend to think. Blushing useful. You signal you are embarrassed, you self-deprecate; you are kowtowing to group, confessing anxiety.

Essay 10: The Man who Couldn’t Stop Eating (pp. 162-183): eating disorders.

I. The story of Vincent Caselli and his Roux-en-Y gastric-bypass operation. This one too has evolutionary implications. All of the essays in this section do: be it the one about blushing or how we impose patterns on things (which we are skipping) we have evolved in reaction. So our bodies work hard to keep our calories going safely in our bodies.

Story of Caselli includes much detail which tells you he is working class: the way it’s done makes me a wee bit uncomfortable: it’s stigmatizing. Both he and wife good at business: he construction, she assisted-living. He ate a lot, big portions and everything on his plate. We eat out of habit too: it’s time so we eat.

So history of weight-loss one of unremitting failure (pp. 169-70). We are built to survive starvation, not deal with abundance. If you diet, your metabolism goes slower to compensate. So it can be a terrible battle to lose weight.

People who have this operation seems mostly to chose not to overeat anymore, to eat less. Though not all. Alas Vincent is eating less because he is forced to, not because of operation. He is not a thoughtful fellow and it may be it’s hard to sink in that this operation has endangered him so that if he overeats he’s at risk. Gets rid of diabetes.

I’m glad to see this emphasis on weight problems through this operation: most of the time you get stories about anorexic women which show little sympathy and less understanding (p. 182): “how can you let yourself look like that?” (see “Girls Want out” by Hilary Mantel, at London Review of Books)

I’m glad to see that Gawande expresses concern at merely plump people opting for this serious operation.

Very recently a study was published which showed our awareness that we are overweight can be attributed to strong advertising on the part of the weight-losing industry. The claim is that some of this distaste for the least fat on women in commercials and films is a product of advertising. Some of the “worry” about obese children in particular may be a construct of advertising campaigns.

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Part 3: Uncertainty

Essay 11: Final Cut (pp. 187-202): the need for autopsies to continue.

An intelligent argument on behalf of autopsy. He thinks its decline is due to doctor hubris — not money or distaste of families of dead patients who give in if pressured. He says that people have always protested autopsy so that it’s unlikely that a new religious motive is coming in here.

How do others feel about autopsy? Why is it in decline? You don’t have to be religious to be emotionally attached to the corpse of the person. Perhaps also a distrust and dislike of hospitals and doctors. Don’t want the body cut up. Final cut.

Gawande shows long history of medicine demonstrates the importance of autopsy in learning about the human body. A corpse can be treated more aggressively. He felt he didn’t need to do autopsies until he discovered a bad mistake.

A long history of misdiagnosis continues (pp. 197ff): 40% in 1998 and not getting better. Why? the nature of fallibility. The tests shows accurate results, but the physician doesn’t call for the right test. People are somewhere between being like hurricanes and ice cubes. Remarkable that he thinks he can come up with what’s wrong with Charlotte Duveen.

Essay 13: Whose Body Is It, Anyway (pp. 208-27) autonomy and having to choose

This essay revolves around the question of asking the patient for their input? Gawande seems to think our communities have begun asking too much of patients to hand them the responsibility?

This is a complete switch-around from earlier practice: much hidden and patient not consulted; treated like a child or someone of a lower class. Gawande says the current medical orthodoxy says let the patient decide.

Is that your experience? Mine is the mildly dominating doctor with a pretense of consulting me.

Case of man who chooses badly (Lazarus, symbolic name) because he can’t face that they don’t have life to offer him but continued near death and misery and yet more misery to sustain that (p 215)

Gawande makes a strong case that patients are themselves emotional, confused, don’t know enough, can’t hear: exhausted, irritable, shattered or despondent (p 222). Gawande preferred to have decision made for him; Dr K saved the life of the man who didn’t want “another machine.”

What is really needed is kindness. That’s the real task (p. 222). Autonomy is but one value among others, but it is an important one. He’s not saying don’t get a second opinion, don’t ask questions, but that ethicists have gone overboard. But Gawande too strong on the side of the doctor deciding. Just about all his stories have patients succumbing to doctors and ending up better off. As usual, he forgets corrupt, indifferent, and bad-choosing doctors.

To sum up: There’s a direct conflict of interest between the pregnant female and the fetus in the sense that childbirth endangers her life and her body; there is the problem that people cannot always hear the truth about anything and make bad decisions, a result of naivety, misinformation and inability to take in the hard reality.

I suggest the man who chose the horrific operation because he couldn’t accept there was nothing doctors could do for him and the woman who had naive ideas about childbirth (knew nothing of history) may be taken as conflicts of interest. We don’t treat suffering itself; we go after what we think we are supposed to care so much about yet do we care about it?

Essay 14: The Case of the Red Leg (pp. 228-52).

Gawande falls into sensational mode: here are these heroic doctors cutting cutting cutting to save. Here we see how Gawande falls into technical virtuosity. Is Gawande too much into this do you think?

Our films, Wit and The doctor stress the need for humanity. Jason a technique freak; so too Kelekian; alas so too was Vivian Bearing when she taught poetry. All avoiding the human. The human is so painful and so uncertain. Wit is about the human condition seen through the prism of illness: how hard to make contact with one another.

For Gawande’s later essays, see comments: Bell Curve; The Score; The Way We Age Now.

Atul Gawande recently withd Jack Cochran, a high official at Kaiser Permanente

Ellen

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Prime Suspect 2 & 3: The Walking Wounded

Jimmy Jackson (David Thewlis), Prime Suspect 3

Dear friends and readers,

This blog may be read as a continuation of my blogs on Lynda LaPlante’s Prime Suspect (1), starring Helen Mirren, and “New hook-up culture another name for “old” casual encounter. In the first I showed the first mini-series was feminist, progressive, advanced ideas of social justice . . . drew insights from the marginalized: the prostitutes, Marlowe’s (John Bowe) common law wife,

but there is a vision of collective hope and empowerment at the end when all do work together.

In the second blog I described our rape-prone culture in the context of its encouragement of exploitative relationships; how young women are driven to be somewhat promiscuous as the price of finding men to go out with. As in the economic public world, so this sexual world allows the worst values to reign.

Now I intend to show that the Prime Suspect series makes this sexual viciousness in our world the terrain of its criminality. It’s beautifully appropriate that a woman comes to the rescue and makes sense that a woman would write the script and another produce the films. Also, in all three Mirren has had a close woman associate helping her. These are indeed 20-21st century versions of heroine’s texts (the phrase is used to characterize the the first series of novels, 18th century with heroine’s at the center, just as often written by men in drag as sensitive brilliant women.

In Prime Suspect 2 the murderer is a pornographer; the people blamed are black.

So the subject is again gender, violence towards women, with a new turn on racism, and desperate poverty among working class whites part of the mixture. The places people live in are part of the text: an old white man suspected of one of the murders in one of these awful tall public tenement buildings. All the re-tellings of Series 2 you come across stress how Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) is having or had an affair with the young black officer assigned to her case: in fact there is one casual encounter, and just as important as race is that she is much older than he.

Sergeant Robert Oswalde (Colin Samuel) and Detective Superintendent Michael Kernan

It’s not overtly feminist, but the difference really is that we are now bringing aboard the full sexual panoply and more marginalized desperate people who are less idealized. The prostitutes of Series 1 were somewhat sentimentalized: the young man who hung himself had in fact participated in the brutal raping, beating and killing of the central victim — along with his sister. The searing moments were watching those black parents made to sit in a waiting room while this son was bullied, harassed, literally driven mad and then put in a cell to die. (This is absolutely the way the modern utterly cruel indifferent system works. If you’re lucky you get on two weeks’ vacation with pay.)

No false uplift at the end. Instead of congratulations — for again it was she who persisted, she who would not believe the old man’s story he did it (to protect his truly lousy son), she who realized the young man who hung himself did it not only because he was driven by another black man ashamed of him but because he had done some of the crime. The belt, finding the photo with that belt. She is overlooked and the super-investigator given the spot.

The murderer was a pornographer and the accent was (Henry Fielding comes to mind this morning) how some people do have bad natures and their surroundings and others only if not deliberately work to make them worse. Every once in a while she is accused slyly of letting her feelings get in the way of her judgment — because she had a casual sort of encounter with the young black subordinate – which could not turn into anything because it’s not permitted.

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Prime Suspect 3

I was riveted to the screen. I suggest the third and the first stories are more powerful than the second because the matter at hand is sexual abuse, sexual violence wrecked on the vulnerable, be it a woman or vulnerable gay male or a boy. And in the third season we were watching not only the victims but the people who do the abuse and the people who let it happen and know it’s happening. In the first season the victims were all dead and no one was letting it happen knowingly.

Sergeant Otley (Tom Bell) with abused rent-boys

I’d call PS 3 a kind of Oliver Twist: Lynda LaPlante was showing us what could have been the realities of a band of boys in the Victorian streets. Polanski tried to make a film of OT doing this and earned the vitriolic enmity of Dickens fans. What is exposed here is a pedophilic ring of men with collusive other men and women enabling them to carry on. No pious family in the wings waiting for little Oliver, and little Oliver who wins at the end is turned into a Connie who loses utterly.

To the high spots of Season 3: I really liked the ending. Season 1 had this silly uplift of intense cheers for all; Season 2 ended with the murder solved and all the bad people either dead or punished so the irony was Tennison was not appreciated, did not get a promotion, and was transferring out to a worse job or place, vice squad. What happened in PS 3 is the murderer, Ciarhan Hinds as Edward Parker Jones, a man whose job it is to run “Advice Centers” for runaway boys, orphans, abused young children is precisely the person who is abusing them; this position is perfect for his business of making money off of them with others who exploit and abuse them. Finally we learn that he set fire to the murder victim, Connie (played by Greg Saunders), an adolescent who, unlike Oliver Twist, was not an angel type, but wanting to get money for an transvestite operation was blackmailing Vera Reynolds, Jimmy Jackson and (very dangerous) Edward Parker Jones by selling photographs of them exposing them having sex with the boys or them as youngsters (Vera’s case). Jane Tennison has only circumstantial evidence and she cannot win the case on its merits. But who were they selling the photographs to? A sleazy woman reporter, Jessica Smithy (played also virtuoso-ly by Kelly Hunter). She is a total shit. Tennison has loathed her all along and the final scene has Tennison call in Smithy and deliberately leave on the desk a folder filled with these photos. In case the viewers are a bit dim, Tennison says your newspaper sells a lot of copy with photos like these. So the idea is Smithy will make splash headlines, sell papers and resmirch Parker-Jones so thoroughly that the state may just win its case against Parker-Jones.

The irony is this is sordid and a direct contradiction to the supposed principles of law where a case is to be tried without pre-judging. We all know what can happen to that. This summer a woman was accused of murdering her child; she was grossly treated by the press and TV and Internet and all was done that could be done to make the decision make her guilty. What happened in the courtroom we don’t know because we have to have been there to feel why the jury voted the way it did. Often such newspaper fouling of a suspect does work.

We are to hope it does in Parker-Jones’s case because we have been shown that the police and people high up knew very well what was happening in the Advice Centers and similar places. I noted that there had been a deliberate juxtaposition of the fat cat dinners of males high up in the police, detectives high up in the police department, lawyers, judges in tuxedoes to the vulnerable male losers of society and the boys. It was more than filmic happenstance giving meaning. In fact John Kennington (played by Terence Harvey), a superintendent and police man for decades had been himself a homosexual who was abusing boys. The other officers were afraid of what he was prepared to do to their careers and had been trying to keep Tennison from going deeply into this case; indeed they wanted her to fail. And they only let her go on when she made it plain she would not expose them for collusion and complicity.

From experience and what I’ve been told I know that drug running and other kinds of “sin” crime go on because the police not only collude but are themselves often on the take. Colonial officers from a powerful country often run businesses in the colonies where they make money off goods that are illegal; they pretend to want to arrest the local people involved; rather they control them.

The collusion and complicity as a motive go further. One of the best moments in Season 1 was when Tennison gets Moyra Henson (Zoe Wanamaker), the common law wife of the serial murderer-torturer, George Marlowe (John Bowe deliberately cast against type — he is often the good man) to half admit she knew what was happening all along and lived with it. So too in this film at several turns we are suddenly looking at a woman who is the sex partner of the bad man and she lets Tennison know she has known what was happening all along. John Kennington’s wife (Rowena Cooper) and Parker-Jones patsy girlfriend social worker, Margaret Speel (Alyson Spiro): as with Moyra these two women did not fnid it to their advantage to tell. It was nice being Mrs Kennington, so rich, with money for her sons to go to fancy schools (she lets out she protected her sons at least) and the fatuous believer in liberal ideas as controlling real people, Margaret Speel, who also had a job to protect.

Moyna Henson, George Marlowe’s long-time common law wife (Zoe Wanamaker)

Anyone reading this will laugh when I mentioned Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa where a key collusive figure is Clary’s mother, Charlotte. She lets it happen; she has become craven over the years from the bullying of her tyrant husband it’s anything for a quiet life with her. Whatever hypocrisy necessary she will do to get Clary to marry the horror Solmes. I’ve always felt that intuition of Richardson particularly important.

Tom Watson (David Harvey), the guilty father tries to take the rap for his murderous torturing son

In Season 2 the colluders were the parents of the porn photographer; they were covering up for him. This sentimentality is somewhat undercut because they were presented as half-afraid of this son, but it’s not enough. We do have two policemen who are revealed as decent. A man who leads Tennison to the right transvestite nightclub (I’d have to watch again to get his name) “comes out” and he is treated ugily by the other police officers, with distrust. He is not bullyable we learn and holds his own. A police officer high up assigned to drive Tennison; it doesn’t make sense that he(again I’d have to watch again to get his name) would be given such a job. Gradually she learns and then gets him to admit he is there as Kennington’s personal watch dog over her. He does help her too. So there is sentimentality here. In the case of the gay policeman I think the “good gay policeman with real integrity” a necessary counter to all the evil people we meet. We don’t need that family as counter because viewers will be pro-family members and want to believe good things of such people, such as loyalty to their son.

Mark Strong from Prime Suspect 3 (Mr Knightley in Davies’s 1996 Emma)

Jonny Lee Miller from Prime Suspect 3 (Edmund Bertram in Rozema’s 1999 Mansfield Park, and Mr Knightey in Sandy Welch’s 2009 Emma)

A sort of side comment which may amuse anyone who has gotten this far and knows I have worked hard on Jane Austen films. I’ve thought that Mark Strong (here in this episode as a firm strong at first anti-feminist policeman) was hired as Knightley precisely because he often plays bad guy strong men, torturers and — it was to give Knightley the “macho” qualities the TV people think the audience will find lacking. Johnny Lee Miller, on the other hand, played both Edmund Bertram and Mr Knightley who on the face of it seem different types (Bertram dim if moral; Mr Knightley all seeing except for his besottedness with Emma and jealousy of Frank Churchill who is still a cad in potential). But they both get the heroine? Why? Like Darcy they have a streak of intense vulnerability, and here Miller was, almost unrecognizable in modern dress, playing a young man who had been badly abused by Parker Jones and others set over him (we hear of nameless policemen either abusing the boys or telling the boys they must say they are lying or will regret it), who breaks down and tells what happened to him, but steely-like will not tell his story in court for at long last he is about to be promoted and wants nothing to get in the way of a decent self-respecting career. He is a colluder in potentia. Years from now he too will be at a dinner in a tux. It’s perfect for the man chosen to play Austen heroes both against and with type, for Austen’s Bertram and Knightley are paragons of virtue.

Mirren herself only breaks down once. There is a sentimental story fused into Season 3: it opens with her having a one or two night fling with an old lover she refused to marry who himself is now married to someone else with 4 children. Her refusal to see him again is treated like a sentimental love story partly. And late in he program we are to believe she’s pregnant. This is an old trope that won’t quite do: women are made to get pregnant after one night or two. It’s not probable though can happen. She gets the news from her doctor that she’s pregnant and makes an appointment for an abortion. We are asked to believe she had an emotional difficulty choosing this route. Maybe but it doesn’t seem probable to me. What does seem probably is the choice for an abortion and her bitter face. She will not bring a child into this world is the idea on Mirren’s face. I liked that.

Vera (Vernon Reynolds)

The third season also had strikingly virtuoso performances beyond Mirren’s, especially John Thewliss as Jimmy Jackson and Peter Capaldi as Vera [Vernon] Reynolds. You could say that this program will open wonderful careers for people who could perform such roles; I am not surprised that it has not. Such roles or character types are rarely wanted, plus there is the intuitive feel borne out by the two biographies that Thewliss and Capaldi are acting partly out of their life’s experience. Strong prejudice then gives people pause, for if Prime Suspect 3 wants to help dispel the prejudice, as in other areas of our society, dispelling prejudice is not readily done. Both have found work basically doing these “types” where they can be found. Thewliss is working class and his first job (before PM) was with Mike Leigh. No surprise there as Leigh does present unusual truths about down-and-out and low status people; he shows love for them and presents stories where we can see them happy even. Thewliss’s next great role was Damage where he plays the son of Jeremy Irons’s father who utterly betrays this son to the point the son kills himself.

So on the whole this third season was superior to the first even and both better than the second.

In Five Full Days the police procedure turned into a TV woman’s novel by Gwyneth Hughes and Anne Pivcevic: it similarly turned on a woman’s point of view of the cruelties of sexual life as experienced by people in our class, money and race ridden bigoted hypocritical societies. They represent a new form of heroine’s text.

Ellen

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David Powell’s Charles James Fox, Man of the People

Charles James Fox (1790s?) by Karl Anton Hickel

Dear friends and readers,

As part of my project reading towards my paper to be given at the EC/ASECS, “‘I have a right to choose my own life:’ Liberty in Winston Graham’s Poldark novels,” I’m rereading the first 7 Poldark novels, reading a couple other historical novels which use the past to project a liberal-leftist and/or feminist point of view (e.g., David Lisse’s A Conspiracy of Paper, and Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin), texts on the concept of liberty, and some genuine background non-fiction books set in the later 18th or early 19th century. One is Charles J Esdaile’s The Peninsula War. I’ll be writing about some of this reading as I finish it, or the spirit prompts me.

Tonight (while the electricity holds out), I want to recommend David Powell’s Charles James Fox, Man of the People. Powell’s is an intelligent, compactly informative book, important because insightful and goes against the strong tendency in our era to interpret earlier history from a conservative point of view. Powell makes a strong case for understanding Fox most clearly as someone who in his later career (after his father died) worked hard an consistently for civil and social liberty for the individual in a real-life real-world political context, which means he had to bend, compromise, build coalitions according to party politics at the time (later 18th century), the way the British parliament and elections and monarchy worked under the impress of specific individuals and his own allegiances. Much that is written insists that Fox had no principle, or even castigates him, but as Powell shows Fox’s life makes no sense unless you see genuine open-mindedness, real toleration and liberalism as the real impulse underneath the various permutations. This point of view on Fox coheres with the perspective on the Lennox family in Stella Tillyard’s two books, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832, and Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-98. Charles was son to Caroline Lennox and Henry Fox, cousin to Edward Fitzgerald.

I was particularly impressed with Powell’s rare ability to get down to the nitty gritty, really tell in literal details what a bill was, how the various sides acted towards it, the individuals involved, at the same time as he gives the motives and whatever principles were or claimed to be involved — all in brief compass.

What follows are some rather more scattered and general assessment remarks than I usually do (I omit details since there were so many ins and outs) from my reading as I went along, and then a posting by Nick Hay where he too assesses the book and quotes ably and epitomizingly from it.

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Henry Fox, later 1st Lord Holland (1705-1774) by Joshua Reynolds

This is an excellent study of the ins and outs of political life in the later 18th century, and how one man, Fox, moved from apparently being an orthodox politician supporting the king to a genuine radical working for modern ideas of liberty across a wide swath of people. Where Powell slides over one can fill in with articles. How Fox fought against Wilkes in the earlier phase of his history: here it was Fox’s loyalty to his father that came in. We see his early years brought up lovingly by his father, the encouragement he was given to develop his mind originally, his extensive reading when at university, a habit he returned to in later life.

Then how he came to switch from being pro-king over the marriage bill where the king demanded that his sons and all further heirs to the throne get permission from the sovereign is a case in point that shows unexpected twists and turns of thought. Here Fox was for sexual liberty for males and liberty for someone to advance him or herself by marriage. Also his father had died and he felt freed to be more radical.

The best article I read was by D. T. Johnson “Charles James Fox: From Government to Oppostion, 1771-1774,” English Historical Review, 89 (1974):750-84. Johnson takes this modern pro-conservative view that Fox didn’t mean his radical enlightenment politics seriously. The changeover relates to Mrs Fitzherbert: it came when the king insisted on the Marriage Bill which gave the monarch the right to veto any marriages of the heir to the throne. It would seem this is an odd choice to change one’s stance on over a life time. Johnson shows it was far more than that; it was personal: Fox had been overlooked and insulted continually by the jealous North; Fox allied himself with Burke as a friend too; yes there was jobbery and inveigling for property and wealth. But in principle Fox was for people having the right (apparently) to marry whom they wanted. It’s presented as venal and personal: he is defending his father and mother, his own desire to marry up, but it seems to me from the quotations far more than that.

Powell appears to believe in Fox’s adherence to real principles after his father, mother and brother died. Powell shows how other scholars and people at the time dismissed his early period of orthodoxy (supporting the king and status quo). Tony Benn’s introduction to Powell’s book sets the situation against our modern one, the differences and similarities. The similarities are self-evident, politics as personal power and riches-grab, with a new ancien regime holding on to what it has, and recently trying to extend it again; the differences too, genuine near universal suffrage with decent laws and customs for the relatively and full powerless or unconnected. It’s paradoxical that Fox came to stand for the rights of these latter: super-wealthy aristocratic, gambler, but also highly well-educated (from Henry and Caroline who we learned about from Tillyard). Benn writes:

The pressure of all these events [1780s through 90s, from "beneath" for annual parliaments, equal or real representation, the French and American revolutionary ideals and doings] made Fox sound like a voice in the wilderness [his point of view was so rare, so individual it seemed] though a century or more later his little minority had won the day – and therein lies the importance of Fox as a major figure in the period through which he lived.

So I conclude he sympathized with Mrs Fitzherbert as he took his stand against the bill that excluded her from being taken seriously. My favorite joke from Caroline’s trial is her answer that the only adultery she ever committed was with Mrs Fitzherbert’s husband.

Fox teamed up with Burke and they made these eloquent speeches and formed a solid opposition to George’s policies against the Americans in the Revolutionary war — which of course got nowhere as the king had the vote, and he was determined to carry on the war with the colonies as about his power and his perogative and bribed everyone with huge sums. In this book George does not emerge as this genial good man who became pathetically ill (the way he does in Alan Bennet’s play and recent books), but as a stubborn, venal, petty, vengeful man protecting his power first and foremost. The figure familiar from Junius at the time, from the early writing of Southey, from Byron and Shelley, from (come to that) Paine and Jefferson.

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Elizabeth Armistead, later Fox (1750-1842), also by Reynolds

One reason I like Fox so much is he married Elizabeth Armistead who as a prostitute with no family and no inheritance was just nobody in this era, less than nobody as an unchaste woman – a very unconventional thing to have done, and was very happy with her in his later years. Like his father before him, he retired to live out a Horatian ideal. He had been a serious student when at Oxford and never lost contact with a rich intellectual life — despite all the years of gambling, promiscuity. A life of Armistead is included in Katie Hickman’s Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century.

Powell does not address the question of Fox’s attitude towards women as such or individual women. We hear he was a notorious libertine, but not one example of how he behaved, who or what the particular woman in question was or the “escapade.” It’s a strange treatment as it’s not irrelevant to Fox’s standing as a politician then or now. I’ve now read three articles on Fox and find 1) there is a strong modern (recent) tendency to want to deny that Fox was at all radical in his thought but to present him as utterly subject to local politics, his engagement with family and friends, and acting out of venal personal motives in part all the time. “Venal” is not unfair: the writers (two reviewers of L. G. Mitchell’s biography) seems to misrepresent Mitchell’s book. Mitchell in his ODNB presents a sympathetic view of Fox, liking him personally but not taking a stand on the sincerity of Fox’s later years in opposition and in defense of personal and other human liberties. The two reviewers both Fox emerges from Mitchell’s book as a horror, one even says Mitchell detests him. He doesn’t if the ODNB is any sign. Both these reviewers seem to react in the way earlier people writing about Fox did: they say they abhor his personal amorality. If so, they never say what the particulars are.

I am suspicious that what they can’t stand is his unconventionality. The man was unconventional in his core being, a reaction to his father’s life and understanding, the education he was given, his mother’s high intelligence and indulgence. I can’t answer Caroline’s question for I don’t know what is meant by th references to Fox’s libertinage. If it includes rape and crimes against women, then his behavior to Elizabeth Armistead is an anomaly. If it’s that he was simply unconventional and lived with equally unconventional people, e.g., he may have had a liaison with Georgiana Spencer; he was later in life close with Charles Grey, who became his loyal henchman in the last years fighting Burke. Also important was his close alliance with Sheridan, the book to read here is Fintan O’Toole’s on Richard Sheridan A Traitor’s Kiss. Not slender, and scholarly, it is also on Ireland (as one person on C18-l said, “a blindspot for many English theorists & advocates of liberty”).

But there is this oddity — which it shares with many books until recently — and perhaps books to come once again. Repeatedly we are told that X, say the Earl of Sandwich in the particular instance (p. 119) was “a notorious profligate” and it was held against him and hurt him politically. But we are told nothing of what this means. What women he was involved with, what he did to them, what gambling or cheating or whatever neglects he was guilty of.

This is strange if you think just a little. What crime did he commit? We are not told. What shameful things? we are not told. When someone gambling debts are known, and it’s usually general, we are told. This is part of the pre-feminist kind of book where women never appear except marginally. (The modern style book is Francine du Plessix-Gray where she pretends to write the book on Sade’s wife; she doesn’t but the wife is there a lot, say even 30% of the time is taken into consideration.). This would suggest no one in Powell’s era could give a damn about the women and also that in the earlier era no one did.

Well if so, why was it deleterious to the man’s career?

It’s also so frustrating to be told this kind of generalization repeatedly and then never told what it means, who it concerns.

The books which begin with Elizabeth Armistead for example or are about her, bring her in, but she is but one of Fox’s women and came later in his life and what he did with her may have been wholly unusual for him. Not so small peeves: when Mary Davies allows her book about Armistead and Fox to be titled The Harlot and the Statesman: The Love Story of Elizabeth Armistead and Charles James Fox makes me loathe to buy it, plus it’s expensive, priced at $25 the least and only available from UK booksellers. Why is he the statesman? There is good reason to believe he did not act out of principle (actually Powell thinks he partly did – that he did really care about individual liberty). Why must she be referred to so stigmatizingly? The word would not have been used of her except maybe by Gillray in a cartoon (and he’s a cruel misgynist consistenty in his pictures)

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Caroline Lennox Fox, Lady Holland (175), a reading, radical and intelligent woman – probably centrally important to Charles too, but marginalized in this book (except as the woman his father dared to marry)

Powell has persuaded me that Fox did work by principles, only that his principles were complicated (friendship came before an adherence in public to the principles of liberty) and shaped by the realities of party politics.

What a complicated story each phase of this man’s political life is. It takes a long time to read each page in order to comprehend what is meant fully. It’s revealing about the brutality of the politics of the later 1790s. The intense ruthless suppression of any dissent was as ferocious and relentless as anything done in France, short of the mass killings in the prisons and on the guillotine. I do love how Burke comes out for once as a neurotic mad-man — this fringe person despised for years and writhing under it, suddenly goes beserk when his order or group is threatened and how he is then used by the powerful for their purposes. To this we get these vivid vignettes of these arisocrats as violent thugs causing riots in the streets, not to omit really suggestiveness about Fox’s psychological motives: in parliament Fox was like someone on a listserv who can beat everyone else with eloquence; he can’t resist flaming others; there is a compensation for his looks going on too.

The ending written in this simple way, and becomes so moving as we watch the man die of dropsy. It’s deeply moving and and Charles James Fox’s last few weeks in power. He did on the last gasp speak extraordinarily for the abolition of slavery.

Nick had said the moving nature of the ending comes from the relationship with Elizabeth Armistead. I didn’t see that as any more central (or less) than from the time he began to live with her on and off at St Anne’s Hill. Like all women in this book she is barely characterized, kept in the margins. It is the one grave fault with the book.

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Abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846)

And here is Nick’s fine assessment:

“I have now finished David Powell’s book Charles James Fox Man of the People (1989). Unfortunately, it is unscholarly – there are no notes, sources or bibliography. Of course it is designed as a popular biography, but that is no reason why a book should be unscholarly (as Jenny Uglow’s book on Thomas Bewick demonstrates). There are some things to be said in its favour…

1) precisely because of its light-weight nature it is an easy read and provides an introduction to the main course of Fox’s life, at least as far as his political career is concerned.

2) Fox himself is such a charismatic, and in the last 15 or so years anyway, of his life charming figure that I became fully involved with the narrative towards the end, and indeed was quite affected by the death-bed scene.

I am not going to attempt any sort of summary but very broadly Fox as a private man moved from hell-raising rake and gambler to devoted monogamist (he was completely in love with Liz Armistead and they were – especially by the standards of the late 18thC aristocracy – a truly devoted couple). Fox as a public man grew more radical as he grew older – a trajectory which always appeals to me, and goes completely against that nonsensical and absurd cliche about people becoming more conservative as they age. His courage in the 1790′s when he opposed Pitt’s repression at the cost of any sort of career, of his popularity, in the face of scabrous vilification and all the forces of the state is truly inspiring. It is certainly true that his earlier career did not suggest this kind of political dedication and there were and are plenty to accuse him of inconsistency – but what is very clear is that in the 1790′s he sacrificed any sort of ambition for the sake of principle.

The following are just notes on things which I particularly enjoyed.

Writing of the corruption of earlier 18thC politics Powell quotes an MP by the name of Hans Stanley who wrote…

If I had a son, I would say to him ‘Get into Parliament, make some tiresome speeches. Do not accept the first offer, but wait until you can make provision for yourself and your family and then call yourself an independent country gentleman’

which demonstrates that corruption in the British Parliament is hardly (as is claimed by the ignorant at present) new. Of course in terms of corruption Walpole himself set a standard which will never be equalled – at least he spent the proceeds well as anyone who has visited his Norfolk home at Houghton can attest.

One thing Powell does do well is to convey the stupidity, meanness and vindictiveness of George 3rd (the book is certainly a good corrective to that absurd Madness film); when Chatham died (the elder Pitt) George 3rd objected to his being buried in Westminster Abbey remarking….

This compliment is rather an offensive measure to me personally’

carrying his vindictiveness beyond the grave.

Reviewing the 18thC electoral system Powell gives a wonderful quote from Sir Philip Francis which shows that the election sequence in Blackadder series 3 (the Dish and Dishonesty episode) was not, in fact, so far from the truth. Here is Francis speaking of his election at Appleby….

I was unanimously elected by one Elector to represent this ancient Borough in Parliament….there was no other Candidate, no Opposition, no Poll demanded, Scrutiny or petition. So I had nothing to do but thank the said Elector for the Unanimous Vote with which I had been chosen

(actually thinking about it the election at Dunny-in-the-Wold was more democratic than this – there were at least other Candidates and a Poll in that case!).

Moving to Fox’s private life I want to cite a couple of passages illustrative of his devotion to Liz Armistead and the quietness of his domestic circumstances in later years. Here he is writing about Liz…

She is a comfort to me in very misfortune, and makes me enjoy doubly every pleasant circumstance of life; there is to me a charm and delight in her society, which time does not in the least wear off, and for real goodness of heart if she ever had an equal, she never had a superior…..The Lady of the Hill is one continual source of happiness to me’

He finally married Liz in 1795, though the marriage was kept secret for 7 years for reasons which are still not clear though it may be that he did not want her dragged into the extremely brutal political arena in which he was operating. Here anyway is John Bernard Trotter’s, Fox’s secretary, description of the Foxs daily round at their country home at St Anne’s Hill….

In summer he rose between six and seven, in winter before eight… After breakfast, which took place between eight and nine in the summer, and a little after nine in the winter, he usually read some Italian authors with Mrs Fox, and then spent the time preceding dinner at his literary studies, in which the Greek poets bore a principal part. A frugal but plentiful dinner took place at three….; and a few glasses of wine were followed by coffee. The evening was dedicated to walking and conversation to tea time, when reading aloud, in history, commenced, and continued till near ten. A light supper of fruit, pastry, or something very trifling finished the day, and at half past ten the family were gone to rest.

Now admittedly this is about as far from his younger hell-raising days as can be imagined, but I had no idea that Fox was like this in maturity – I had been utterly deceived by the popular (mis) representations. If for nothing else reading Powell has been worthwhile in correcting me in this misapprehension.

I’ll note for Ellen’s interest that Powell writes that Liz once had to ‘confiscate’ a copy of Fanny Burney’s Camilla when Fox began to read the newly arrived book aloud at dinner, and for my own interest that he maintained an acquaintance with Crabbe. Like Crabbe and Bewick (and it seems almost everyone) he became an amateur naturalist listing every flower and plant on his small estate.

Here is a poem Fox wrote to Liz on his 50th Birthday – the poem may hardly be called a classic but the sentiment is affecting -

Of years I have now half a century passed
And none of the fifty so blessed as the last.
How it happens that my troubles thus daily should cease,
And my happiness thus with my years should increase,
This defiance of Nature’s more general laws,
You alone can explain, who alone are the cause’

(in some ways Fox is a Byronic figure – the aristocratic rebel – but in his mature private life he could hardly be more different).

Fox was of course above all a magnificent orator – the greatest in a period of great orators (Chatham, Burke, Sheridan) and Powell quotes several of his speeches. I pick the following from 1800. Fox is replying to a suggestion that, rather than seeking peace with France, Britain should pause and see how events turn out. Fox replies to Pitt …

In former wars a man might at least, have some feeling, some interest, that served to balance in his mind the impressions which a scene of carnage and of death must inflict….But if a man were present now at a field of slaughter, and were to inquire for what they were fighting – ‘Fighting!’ would be the answer; they
are not fighting, they are pausing.’ ‘Why is that man expiring? Why is that other writhing in agony? What means this implacable fury?’ The answer must be ‘You are wrong, sir; you deceive yourself. They are not fighting. Do not disturb them; they are merely pausing. This man is not expiring with agony – this man is not dead – he is only pausing…..All you see, sir, is nothing like fighting – there is no harm, cruelty or bloodshed in it whatever; there is nothing more than a political pause.

This brilliant invective rings clear across the centuries as we consider the language used to cloak and soften the horrific realities of war.

In his very last speech in the Commons on 10th June 1806 Fox spoke in support of the abolition of slavery….

‘So fully am I impressed with the vast importance and necessity of obtaining what will be the object of my motion this night, that if, during the almost forty years that I have had the honour of a seat in Parliament, I had been so fortunate as to accomplish that, and that only, I should think I had done enough, and could retire from public life with comfort, and the conscious satisfaction that I had done my duty.’

He died on 13th September 1806 his last words being to his wife who was at his side ‘It don’t signify my dearest dearest Liz.’

Powell points out that by modern standards Fox was in many ways not a radical especially in his opposition to universal suffrage. However I found him a far more courageous and sympathetic figure than I expected and would certainly like to read a fuller more scholaryl book than this, which he most definitely merits.”

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Barbauld’s once famous political prophetic poem

I answered Nick thus:

McCarthy in his book on Barbauld gives an effective description of the 1790s so we see how not just the radicals, but ordinary people with let’s say progressive ideas were frightened, and punished for the least appearance of enlightened thought or protest. The government was behind the riots at Priestley’s house and it together with power local people across the country repeated the same kinds of acts backed by military might and local ostracism, firing, and scapegoating. The Barbaulds were the type that were affected here, and many of their friends.

She like Fox was brave in the 1790s, but not quite as brave, only of course she was a woman so it wasn’t possible to stand on the world’s stage. She published then famous works anonymously; it was known they were by her, and she was partly protected because she was a woman. Who cared what she thought. I have a parallel passage to Nick’s by Fox in the 1790s where her idea that’s use language truthfully and say the thing a thing is is brought to clear power. Here is she arguing that the still powerful cruel idiocies about calling the blessing of God on your murderous activities (war) is somehow a moral thing to do. She writes in Sins of the Nation

we have calmly voted slaughter and merchandized destruction” – and urged that things should be called by their proper names: “When we pay our army and our navy estimates, let us set down – so much for killing, so much for maim­ing, so much for making widows and orphans, so much for bringing famine upon a district, so much for corrupting citizens and subjects into spies and traitors, so much for ruining industrious tradesmen and making bankrupts (of that species of distress at least, we can form an idea)

Ellen

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Scholem Aleichem, or, Laughing in the Darkness

Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, pen-name Scholem Aleichem (1859-1916)

Dear friends and readers,

Izzy and I went to see Scholem Aleichem, or, Laughing in the Darkness late Sunday afternoon. Bob (on Trollope19thCStudies) had recommended it a couple of weeks ago now. So now I’ll repeat the recommendation: it’s a fine film, one of the best I’ve seen in a while (really all summer).

It’s a biographical study of the *Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich*, once a leading Yiddish playwright. Sholem Aleichem is the pen-name of his imagined narrator; apparently Aleichem presents himself as a disembodied persona. He is a part author and or owner of his sad-tragic-comic tales. His characters part respect him (especially the older/father figure): they know they like the tunes; they learn to know and love the words. They converse, and then argue. Mr Perry deplored that so now all Eliza Austen has to do is renew her relationship with William Radcliffe. He cares for real people mirrored in the book’s stories.

The film done with great finesse, candour and insight and sensitivity too. The film-maker, Joseph Dorman, has woven a life through the works in the way of recent written biographies. The viewer more or less follows the trajectory of Aleichem’s life filled out by over-voice comments and commentaries by educated people (and one relative) about these stories and their relevance to Aleichem’s character and life story. (The mode of interview reminded me of NOVA specials). We don’t get an interpretation of the stories for their own sake or a description of their aesthetics. Instead the work is made to reflect the life and used where it would come in the life and it takes up space: the writer is described as writing the work as it’s described. The result in this film is the life is illuminated and so are the stories. The quality is like that of a PBS series some years ago (maybe decades) about a group of American poets supposed to reflect also on American life.

The film done with great finesse, candour and insight and sensitivity too. The viewer more or less follows the trajectory of Aleichem’s life filled out by over-voice narrator storytelling and comments and by commentaries by educated people (and one relative) about these stories interspersed with the life chronology and representations of his works. The mode of interview, with the interviewee in his or her study, reminded me of NOVA specials.

The idea at the heart of the film is to examine the issue of individual identity as it relates to the person’s culture. The point is made the Jewish identity that Aleichem captured and spoke to in his work is now vanished sufficiently so that if you want to present any of them dramatically you have to change the values and what happens in the stories. So when his stories of Tevye, the dairy man, were transformed into Fiddler on the Roof, a successful Broadway musical and film, even the opposite meanings are projected. So when at the end of the story upon which Fiddler on the Roof is based the daughter does not leave the father; she does not go off with her husband in Aleichem’s story, that’s a happy ending (in a semi-tragic tale mind). People who have seen Fiddler on the Roof will recall the daughter does leave, leaves for the successful modern life and that’s the happy ending.

What was especially excellent was how the voice-over narrator, quotations from the stories, pictures, and commentators conveyed the quality of Aleichem’s writing. The theme they emphasized is caught up in the film’s subtitle: laughing in the darkness. Aleichem had himself been the son of a man doing somewhat better than the others in the shtetl; when he was 13, his father lost the money he had had and business. They were bankrupt. The father had sent his son to some sort of secular schooling and even after he found he had no money managed to send him to a high school equivalent where he was reasonably educated. The young man obtained a job as a tutor with a wealthy family and the daughter and he fell in love. He was ejected, but she followed him and they married. Eventually he inherited his father-in-law’s fortune. With that he and his wife moved to Kiev and he started up a periodical and lived the life of a bourgeois intelligentsia person. He lost his money (was not practical) and had to turn to his mother-in-law for help. Periods of poverty alernated with periods of relative prosperity. He saw much in life, the way much is conducted utterly irrationally. The vision of his works seems to be wild laughter in the face of underlying hysteria.

Nothing could be further from Fiddler on the Roof whose feel of the past is nostalgic, sentimental, and comfortable with life. I’ve seen the musical three times on stage and know it rejoices in being alive and suggests the future to come is good.

So I’m not sure this kind of change is from change of identity; often fine works when turned into movies have their essential meanings reversed, partly because the more intelligent thinking reader is only a small part of a mass audience, partly because reading alone to the self invites the text to become about vulnerable asocial experience while watching in a crowd must please the crowd so substitutes strongly socially-oriented perceptions of experience. But it seems to be obvious that the culture Aleichem recreated in his works is now gone from us, and the film was making the point that a new culture had arisen from the old. That people of Jewish ancestry have had to make new or different identities. I agree with that.

I know that I have created a kind of identity for myself and am moved by such stories of such attempts. Mine emerged from my reading of English novels and memoirs from the time I was an adolescent (P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins in the Park) to when I got my Ph.D. and went to England, and then married an Englishman. I like to read novels of hybrid-cultures, say Anglo-Indian where you find individuals struggling to find themselves, create some identity they can endure, bear with and the price of this. This is Jhumpa Lahiri’s powerful theme in Namesake.

But it is also a common theme in books today — or how we read them. In my classes last term we treated Graham’s Ross Poldark as about a couple who are individually trying to survive and build lives for themselves which are unconventional while they remain safe. We discussed Andrea Levy’s Small Island as about how one can’t escape a painful identity which is not you but used against you by the society around you. So maybe this modern take in the film tells us more about us than Aleichem. Or as much.

The tone of the talk in the film was upbeat throughout but if you listened to the content what was said was grave. The film’s least upbeat tones were reserved for the death of Yiddish. A library filled with books in Yiddish was filmed. The point was no one or few can read them now. A rich literature just “thrown away” the narrator said, without examination. It was that Yiddish was stigmatized and so it was not wanted.

I know that Yiddish was not the only dialect of Hebrew mixed with a local language across Europe. Yiddish grew up in Eastern Europe (my grandparents spoke Yiddish, my mother used to be able to understand it when it was spoken to her) and was found in German to the Eastern European countries and to Russia, but a different dialect, a compound of Hebrew and Spanish grew up in Spain called Ladino developed and spread across Spain and into Greece, Turkey, the Balkans. So Yiddish was not universal in Europe for Jewry; it could have become universal say through the publication of its newspapers (my grandfather used to read one as I recall) and books in the US and elsewhere, and Aleichem spent much of his genius, money, talents, time trying to create this literature from scratch. But it had no hegemony through power structures. Probably it needed to be taught in public schools run by state gov’ts and was not.

For me the stunning thing was the sheer amount of photos, and films of 19th and early 20th century Jewish life in Russia in the communities where Jewish people were forced to live and also some cities apparently individuals could live in (Kiev, where Aleichem during a period of strong prosperity lived for a time). One could see village life, the intense poverty of these people (often they are dressed in very heavy clothing, even in their houses, signalling how cold it is there), photos of the killings (corpses) left over from the mid-century pogroms which drove Jewish people out of Russia to the US (some stayed in the UK en route), photos of Jewish communities and Aleichem’s funeral in NYC (1913-1916). Of course many photos of Aleichem; one grand or great-granddaughter was one of those interviewed.

It was very moving. The auditorium was full, I’d say mostly of Jewish people, though the clientele of this West End Cinema movie house was there too. It’s located in Georgetown and is a genuine art theater. It’s the place where we have seen European HD operas. They had The Anchor (about a working class woman English writer who died young, she lived in the equivalent of welfare projects in the UK up north); next week they’ll have a film about the use of ballet in opera; Izzy and I saw Cave of Forgotten Dreams there two weeks ago. People applauded Scholem Aleichem at the end. However, we saw the film in the only theater in all the Maryland, Virginia and DC area it was playing in. The usual supposed art cinema (independent) Izzy and I go to was said to be having this film soon: Cinemart he calls his theater. He is about 2 blocks (NYC style) from a local Jewish Community Center (where Izzy nowadays goes for a social club she enjoys) and in May each year his theater has a festival of Jewish films half-hosted by the JCC but I can see he’s hedging because he really plays semi-popular films and if a film doesn’t get a big enough audience quickly, it vanishes from his theater.

Go see it if you can.

Ellen

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Books in art and science (Sharp 4): Fairy books; Medical books, outsiders, & handbooks as territorial struggles; Keepsakes, Alice in Wonderland and Pitman sten

The Blue Fairy Book, compiled (and written by) Andrew Lang

Alice in Wonderland — in translation

Dear friends and readers,

I am come to the fourth and last blog on this conference. Today topics included the fantastical and imaginative (fairy books and math and Alice in Wonderland), just its seeming opposite, medical memoirs, and large handbooks whose entries and publication are fought over tirelessly because such huge amounts of money can be made by a few if the organizations can keep preventing universal non-profit medicine from going into effect. In effect the social targets for fantastical and fairy books brought before the listener how it was supposed children and their middle class parents were interacting with books, while medical books and the institutions which ignored, published or supported them showed us how an interested profession used books to fight over their territory and promote themselves, their science agenda, their careers.

A Sunday story. There was hardly any traffic on the way in, at noon the park outside the Dillon center was filled with people doing all sorts of things and the carousel nearby crowded with children.

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“The Bronze Ring” from The Blue Fairy Book

Sunday morning I might be said to have fitted in two sessions each period since in both cases, I left 2/3s the way through one session and arrived at the second session where there was still 2/3s to go. In both cases the questions were good enough to elicit re-explanations of the papers. So I heard twice as much.

At 9:00 I went to “Utopia, Fantasy and Prophecy,” and heard a paper by Jennifer Gundry on how print culture (books, thoughtful high-minded doings) were regarded with suspicion and distrust in a selection of Utopias. The critics and reviewers (rightly) assault advertising, find slipping literary standards at each new technology or innovation; they indict the low quality of the new productions. Print has failed 19th and 20th century society. It would seem the only printed object valued is money. Sara Hines described the unexpected huge success of Andrew Lang’s series of “colored” fairy books; here there is a stronger nostalgic pull. With the success of the Blue Fairy book, Lang went on to compile (and write) the nostalgic notes. Critical writing and studies of folklore and fairy tales enables us today to understand him. (Probably translation studies ought to be brought in). Green came next, then a rainbow, then violet. Lang were first intended for the Christmas market; eventually they functioned as a poet manque for family rituals, gathering and creating time together.

I hurried out to a session on scientific and medical publishing. Sounds boring? Think again: Darwin is a central tract; so too Humboldt. I spend 1/3 of my course reading serious books on how medicine is practiced today. Jim Conor’s paper on “The Editing and Publishing History of Rural and Medical Care (1948) was of direct relevance to the essays I read with my students. This was not a how to book: name a condition and then offer treatments. Rather it is a book which describe and defines disease and has essays on aspects of the profession and its author was strongly for socialized medicine. Mr Conor told a story of a man who had continually to fight to get his book published, then respected, then distributed. Eventually it became enormously influential in Canada, in US minus the politics which (if I understood him correctly) were cut out. Jennifer Conor’s paper on a specific medical memoir by Gordon Murray enabled me to see how the medical establishment viewed the kind of scientific medical memoirs I’ve been assigning students for years. With respect. The specific one she discussed had problems that were never resolved, especially balancing autobiography and telling an appealing story with explaining technical cases in difficult language.

The interest of the Health Guide is how it became a lightning rod for political issues. The AMA and other powerful physician organizations were vigilant against anything smacking of socialism, and defining illness in ways that insurance companies want to control was seen as strongly socialist behavior. The AMA fought to suppress the book. Now its definitions are used by our local day coffee bar place. As to memoirs, they can teach ethical norms, and do well when they are beautifully written, like Atul Gawande’s Complications), and can reach a large layman audience. Jennifer Conor said a president of a respected college had had to resign recently because it was discovered he plagiarised his goodbye speech from Gawande’s Complications. The students had read Gawande and recognized the passage by checking the texts on their computers.

I got myself a coffee and then went to the mid-morning sessions. Marie-Claude Felton’s paper was “‘Je ne suis pas fou’: The Self-publishing journey of poorly-estimated scholars in the 19th century was a general history of statistics; she showed far more scientists managed to spread their work by self-publishing than is realized. Johanna Lilja told of an “indefatigible botanist” who persisted in the face of neglect, ridicule and misery; institutional norms destroyed him personally though much later in life he was done justice to. The paper was very sympathetic towards the institution and its problems and showed how it learned from this experience to cope with non-conformity. Susan Pickford began her paper by telling of what she called with any specific definition or defense “insane” scientists; she was going to talk about “outsider literature,” but I felt the use of such a blanket derogatory term (“insane”) unacceptable (like the use of “idiot” in Victorian literature for mentally disabled people) in scientific, medical (or humane) senses so quickly left.

I found I had just time to listen to two papers and heard a third discussed afterward from another session, “Play and Politics.” Manuela Mouraco and Margaret Stetz argued the children’s books he described were made with parents’ ideas and desires in mind; they taught children to fit in; encouraged certain kinds of socialization and interest in subjects that are career-worthy. Mouraco and Adam Trammell agreed the Keepsake and other annuals were intended to build an identity for the people buying them; they are books with a strong middle class bias and show nostalgia for the past.

In this session and an earlier one on librarians helping children to form reading groups in libraries, the idea was endorsed in the discussion time afterward that in a classroom socialization is as or more important than the topic taught. So that if math is being taught, the children should be made to do it in group settings. This reminded me of how the whole conference seems to value how books function socially for people, what intellectual stance they enable people to feel they belong to (or do). But what about the child who learns best alone and would learn far more about the topic if left to do so alone. He or she will be straitjacketed into first enacting a set of general social skills or be made to feel bad if he or she can’t (and perhaps graded on social capability rather thabn math). This set of values makes learning very hard for the disabled (e.g., autistic children). And it’s not just the autistic that such tactics in a classroom would stmy but many non-outward people. We do have inward growth as we learn academic subjects sheerly for themselves.

For lunch I sat with Elizabeth Starr on a bench in a lovely shaded area and we shared a sandwich, memories and goals. We hope to keep contact up. She has a student working on a biography of Jane Austen for younger readers and perhaps I could help.

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The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, illustration by John Tenniel

The last session I attended was unexpected fun for me. It was on translating Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Clare and August Imholtz, a married couple of independent scholars and book collectors gave papers on different translations of Alice. Clare went over many kinds across the globe, and August concentrated on those just in Russian. Statistics of how many translations and where are impressive. Of course translation is bad at puns, and some of the word play and games that provide the experience we have of the text. They named particularly good ones (a Spanish one); August took us into the realms and suppositions of a Russian child.

Catherine Parisian then got up to tell us the history of Alice in Wonderland translated into Gregg and Pitman. How many Pitman’s, how many Gregg’s. It seems this was a way of teaching girls to read and to use phonetics. She knew I was in the audience and could read Pitman stenography and I did come up to the front to declare this text was Pitman and did not use vowels or the three line approach and the other was written precisely following the conventions. Stenography by hand is associated with women working in offices and we find it spread as soon as jobs were created: 1872 in the UK it’s said 6 women knew Pitman, in 1893 6000. Gregg grew exponentially from 1901 -1915. Alice was published in 4 systems: Callenders (1899, the 7th, Mad Tea Party chapter), Pitman (1908 and 1909), Gregg (1915) and Pitman again (1979, Chapter 7).

We discussed stenography as well as why the Alice books appeal so. We also discussed the real gender faultline in the uses of hand stenography in the first 3/4s of the 20th century. I offered my memory that in my high school class in 1963 there were not boys learning shorthand, though you could find boys learning to type. Only girls learnt sten so there was a strong taboo of shame involved. But when machine stenography spread and began to be used by court reporters, men went in for the training in great numbers in post-secondary school.

I was charmed with the notion that stenography had been taught this way. In Richmond Hill High School where I was first taught Pitman stenography I was never encouraged to respect it as a system. I did that later when I studied languages in college. I should say here that all the blogs I’ve written since I started going to conferences and blogging are the result of my use of stenography. While recently I can no longer cover pages of my sten pages in pure Pitman, and must use English spelling and abbreviated words, when I am really trying to get down specific wording there’s nothing comes near using Pitman sten.

A table of short forms within Pitman

It’s a 19th century invention.

There was again much more to the conference in the later afternoon. A Plenary panel, a general meeting, and finally an African American Literary Walking Tour, with Toast. I could not do any of it. This was the last night of the Capital Fringe Festival: we had tickets for La Belle Parricide, a play by a community of women on Beatrice Cenci so my conference ended on Alice in Pitman. Many people appeared to be leaving around the same time.

As I came out of the building, the sun seemed so bright and the air very hot. I threaded into the quiet justle of people going down the escalator. The trains to and from into Alexandria were running on just one track (not two) so there seemed to be a mass of people waiting to get on as they were thus running slowly (taking turns). I got home in plenty of time.

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This is the first conference I’ve written about in this extensive way in quite a while. I had heard a diverse number of excellent papers which took positions which did teach about how books can be or are made to function socially. Countless individuals have largely idiosyncratic or personal responses to books that these large social perspectives ignore or sweep by and these are important for the individuals and for their communities too — making for finer disinterested ideals from the sympathetic imagination which can cross all borders. Yet people do choose a book because they are part of a particular sophisticated or political world, and read as part of that (often class-based) world. About this group of people at the conference, I came away feeling the generality might have at one time really loved books for themselves (as on some level I still do a fine, beautiful or wise and good and great book), for their texts (ditto), and that’s why they cared about books materially and how they function as social instruments, commodities and social capital.

See Sharp 1, Sharp 2, and Sharp 3.

Ellen

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