NY Trollope Society’s Winter Meeting: Prof Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee

Death of Henri de la Rochejaquelein, painting by Alexandre Bloch

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve been to NYC with the excuse of hearing an (in the event) wonderfully suggestive lecture by Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee. Prof Birns spoke at the Groliers’ Club, an older building with full library along 44th Street.

On the novel itself, we read this twice on Trollope19thCStudies and I’ve put the postings onto my website so the reader can find many good essay-postings on the novel there. What I have to offer here are notes I took from Professor Birns’s talk: heads of topics, sketches of themes, historical writing, and an insight into the visualization of place in La Vendee which connects it to Trollope’s novella, Cousin Henry where Professor Birns ended his talk.

One problem with the talk wwhich Prof Birns confessed upfront was Prof Birns had not read the French aristocratic woman’s memoir on which book is based: Memoirs of the Marquise de la Rochejaquelin (translated by Scott). It’s very difficult to access. Trollope did much research and other sources are Lamartine’s recent history, The Girondists and a long history of the French revolution by one Archibald Alison whom Disraeli mocked as Mr Wordy. Trollope did general research too — as he did for his travel books, one of which (abortive) was an Irish one around this time.

First Prof Birns offered a preliminary set of thoughts as a preface. This is Trollope’s third novel, and comes out of intimate relationship with Ireland and his experiences of countryside and marginalized world there. Trollope knew French culture and history. Prof Birns suggested that Trollope was looking for successful topic, and his two Irish novels didn’t sell. Representing a place became for him a way to represent hus metaphoric thinking … There is rich forest and landscape in novel. (Trollope is not known for his descriptive abilities but they are important as is his use of place, houses as symbols, landscapes too.)

Professor Birns reminded us that 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe. (There was much interest in revolution in this era of open class struggle and the first building of unions.) Carlyle has a real success with his French revolution book which is hard to read; Dickens writes or will write Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. Trollope, though, chooses counter-revolution emerges. Why? He asks and tries to asnwer, Why did peasants not support revolution? They are guerillas. Prof Birns instanced the Spanish peninsular war as analogous complicated event. Prof Birns brought up Balzac’s Les Chouans, a violent book (it seems), but it was of course Scott who Trollope is centrally imitating in La Vendee. Prof Birns also recommended Flanigan’s 20th century historical fiction, Year of the French as a companion insightful book, showing French and Irish parallels? (I have it and could not get into it. Must try again.)

As to the kind of historical fiction, La Vendee represents: Trollope uses real historical characters. It is probably also true that place is central to historical writing. It was Prof Birns’s insight that Trollope resorted to historical fiction to write a book and used the characteristics of historical fiction to try to get into what was to him another time and place and also present an inner meaning or vision about the way human politics works:

What happened was the provinces resisted a central power. Rich lords against any revolution; military leaders had allegiance to ancien regime. This was also a conflict between modern secular groups and Catholic conservatives. Trollope take sides, clearly with rebels. The question would be, why.

The central appealing character killed off in Trollope’s novel, which comes alive around that point. There is an emotionally held-in unhappiness here (said Prof Birns). Trollope also against romanticism and revolution; Prof Birns then connected book to Cousin Henry, a self-flagellating book, where place is crucial. Wales the setting of this novella and Henry ostracized and terrorized by others in the village; Henry cannot understand brutal unsubtle culture.

Prof Birns said Trollope resorts to ekphrasis because he has trouble getting into these cultures. Ekphrasis is a word that has become fashionable nowadays; it appears frequently in academic discourses (and also talk about poetry). Myself I don’t recall Cousin Henry as visual but rather an intense psychological study of a man who is outcast and susceptible to cruel bullying, but I do recall La Vendee is striking in its visual portraiture, especially one scene where the wife of an openly loving married couple (unusual for Trollope) look out a window and the wife describes the battle seen to her husband much in the manner that Rebecca describes a battle to the wounded Ivanhoe.

Olivia Hussey as Rebecca from the famous scene, and a felicitious still of Anthony Andrews as Ivanhoe (from the 1982 mini-series)

(Trollope’s novel has never been filmed.)

At this point my notes give out. I was really cheered by the friendly greeting of the man who runs the society, Randy Williams; by meeting Stephen Amarnick and hearing how his edition of the complete Duke’s Children is coming along. Two people told me they are on Trollope19thCStudies and read my postings sometimes. One woman said she could not stand I gave away something about Downton Abbey (! see my P.S). I hope now that I’ve retired to be able to find time to come to NYC to attend the society’s meetings, e.g., go to this year’s dinner and come far more regularly to the lectures.

For the rest of our trip, a diary journal (we saw 3 operas, 1 play, a movie, went to Central Park, the Met Museum, the Strand, and walked a hellavu lot: From NYC: a diary of shopping, theatre-going, walking …

Ellen

Postscript: Still on the train earlier in the day, coming into the station. We are waiting in the space between seats in a crowd of people pushing holding luggage, I see a young man with largish black laptop at the same time watching his screen. I peek. There’s Miss Obrien in her usual corner spot at the table next to her Shirley Maclaine’s maid, POV Anna, across the way Mrs Hughes … .. Later I go to lunch and open New Yorker, first joke I come to: lady visiting prison on phone reporting to husband “the bad news is Lady Sybil died but Bates is home … “

Jim now tells me the man had all 3 seasons of Downton DVDs on his table set up in his seat area …

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Rigoletto in Las Vegas (a rape story), a 19th C Lohengrin (swans anyone?): Re-settings can jar

Gilda (Diana Damrau) and Rigoletto (Zeljoko Lucic) coping inside 1950s be-finned car (Rigoletto at the Met)

Elsa von Brabant (Annette Dasch) and Lohengrin (Jonas Kaufmann) coping among soaked wheat shafts (Lohengrin at La Scala)

Dear friends and readers,

Full disclosure: usually I like re-settings. I have enjoyed each of our local DC Source Theater (director Clara Huber) updatings of Mozart by a rewrite of the libretto and re-staging of the opera. It made the Mozarts more understandable in our terms. Of the few Euro-trash doings of opera I’ve seen (on HD screens), all but one rightly I thought undercut the reactionary nature of the numinous personages in the opera play; Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni turned the providential pattern of Mozart’s play into a story of despairing refuge. I was deeply stirred by the abstract re-staging of Traviata with the acting of Natalie Dessay. But the change has to be genuinely thought out; it cannot be done just to attract a younger audience (as I suspect the new Rigoletto has been) or out of embarrassment (which I think was the reason for resetting Lohengrin out of 10th century raw beasts and crudities). The money motive and the vanity motive have to be downplayed if art is to transcend the realities of its concrete situation and players.

So not all re-settings, no matter how at first allegorically seemingly right (sleazy, mean Vegas for Rigoletto), and physically preferable (primitive swamp, duelling in Lohengrin) work out. For the Rigoletto the altered placing was too specific, called too much attention to moral irritants and absurdities in Verdi’s opera (the Duke “sure a dreamboat“); in Lohengrin the original words referring to things in the 10th century kept were out of whack with the singer’s 19th century clothes & environment. This is the most charitable lesson one can take away from this past week’s two HD operas.

Each time I’ve seen Verdi’s Rigoletto (about 3 before this) I’ve wept copiously as Gilda lays dying and Rigoletto begs her not to leave him all alone, not to die. This time I couldn’t quite; there was something slightly risible about Damrau and Lucic doing their scene over and in the trunk of a 1950s cadillac. I thought to myself they had to practice not to fall off. I had also been jarred into paying attention to the actual happenings of Rigoletto partly because the language had been partly updated.

When Gilda rushes from the duke’s lair where she had been abducted and then seduced into having sex with him, I realized for the first time this was a post-rape scene. If she were a virgin (something the subtitles still insisted upon), it must’ve hurt, there must’ve been coercion. She certainly seemed upset at having been tied up and put into a sarcophagus and dumped into a man’s room. By rights Rigoletto should have rushed her to the police. It will be said that in terms of the re-setting Rigoletto as comedian side-kick of didn’t dare offend duke as casino owner but these were not the terms upon which the man was suffering. Further what an ass she was. Not only she but in the next act, most unlikely Sparafucile’s prostitute-sister, Maddalena (Oksana Volkova) who declared how much she loved this shit Duke (Piotr Beczala):

There seemed something wrong in the fun Piotr Beczala was having as the relaxed Dean Martin type when he was more than a cad; a continual heartless rapist who had ordered the local police to murder a sheik outraged by his daughter’s sexual spoiling. As a 21st century audience we still could have felt for a father whose culture made him take loss of virginity as the equivalent of a young women’s destruction and his shame forever, but then we were being asked to take it as fun, as trivia because the “rat-pack” as the Met introducers and discussions in the intermissions persisted in calling Frank Sinatra and his friends’s famous nightclub life together. The setting had the paradoxical effect of calling attention to the problems in Verdi’s conception. Lost were what made the story despite this ultimately dismissive treatment of women as people moving nonetheless.

What might be a valuable lesson in compassion, a source of identification in our autonomous lives was ridden over. The re-write called Rigoletto a Quasimodo at one point. That’s right. Hugo and then Verdi had made the aging fool a hunch-back, a de-formed disabled man who had taken on a vicious and spiteful carapace partly because of the way he’d been treated by others. Lucic had the slightest high shoulder, the slightest limp, his jester status slightly unfortunately not forgotten by his absurdly brightly-colored variegated sweater:

Rigoletto as usually staged shows a man all alone; the words of the libretto which insist on the unusualness of his having no family around him but Gilda were kept and this condition of isolation, of this one girl being all his home, his security, his peace (usually she is envisaged in a garden apart from the court) was lost. He cries “non lasciarmi”. The Met understandably had kept the original Italian libretto, and not only did Lucic and Damrau sing with exquisite beauty, strength and psychological distraught tragic feeling, they made the Italian come out clearly.

Most crucially, neither of the principles had changed their decades-long understanding of their characters one iota. During the interviews in the last HD performance (the interviews in one HD opera have now become an ad for the upcoming one) Lucic said emphatically his character believed the curse of the wounded father of the first act (in this version an Arab man who Rigoletto mocked by putting a towel on his head); a 16th century man as understood by 2 19th century ones would have. But not a hired comic in a 50s nightclub. Lucic said with overt irony and explicitly as if he had no idea what director, Michael Mayer had been talking about, he was to be “Don Rickles. Jim told me this comic is said to have made laughter out of the most vicious impulses: he would pick and ridicule a customer at one of the nightclub tables in front of everyone else, causing most people there (who comes to such a scene) to laugh derisively. Diana Damrau was even more unable to see any change she could make in her character. In one of her interviews she came close to saying as the best praise she could come up with that new production had not ruined the opera or her character for her.

While I watched I felt that not a lot more than these two central characters be re-thought had needed to be done to make the switch in setting function in some new way. Beczala clearly had made the leap into relaxed cad (as he showed in his interviews too); the use of the chorus girls did have the effect that many say Euro-trash is meant to: it undercut the solemnity with which this pro-elite form usually takes itself and diminished him physically too: the audience could be heard laughing as the girls made these faces, arched their bodies and brushed him with their feathers:

But by the end of the opera and on the way home I realized the the serious core of the piece had been trivialized. The Met people are anything but feminists and it’s the last thing they’d want to do to make the audience take this rape seriously so rather than think about that they decided to take the whole situation as so much gay decadence. What were the lives of Dean Martin (whom one of the courtiers, Marullo, was got up to look like)? I began to wonder if Sammy Davis Junior (whose photo was flashed during intermission) gave to black American causes. Jim assured me Davies quietly had; he had, like Obama, been half-white, in his case Jewish, an outsider on several counts, as he was slightly deformed and small for a man.

I think in the case of Rigoletto we were better off being left alone in quieter staging, abstract, old-fashioned — as Ronald Blum says the best moments were when the principles were on the stage alone; if the terms of what happened were not to be changed, you should not make the setting neon-lit 20th century. If you update it specifically, you must update the meaning of the action too. Some of this was recognized by the audience. The people we were sitting next to agreed with us (and others) that the actor-singer for Sarafucile (Stefan Kocan) was brilliantly effective. Much younger than the rest of the central cast, he really enacted a nasty coarse thug, as ready to kill for money at a moment’s notice as he was filled with a sense of his own rich luxurious elegance:

Having a bartender listen to Rigoletto morose broodings was effective. Maria Zifchak as a egregiously corrupt guardian-Giovanna out of some 1940s comic noir film was funny and effective in the same way Stephanie Blythe as Madame Ulrica had been earlier this year in Un Ballo en Maschera. Maybe they needed to stage the production as a 1940s movie, a reflection of how reality was understood not what any reality had been. I did enjoy those costumes and a couple of the minor performers where an imitation of a star or type as seen in movies was intended.

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Jim said the problem in both cases was in the opera itself.

This certainly felt true as we watched Lohengrin at the West End Cinema (DC movie-house, not far from Foggy Bottom Metro station). This time the action was mythic, and it seemed to me Claus Guth was trying to make sense of its contradictions in modern terms and it just wouldn’t do. This was another opera that would have been better staged as simply and barely as possible.

This photo with a different Elsa (Anja Harteros) comes from a rehearsal shot

At first I thought we were to take the action as Lohengrin or Elsa’s bad dream (see story). There were extras dressed as a young Elsa and her brother (whom she is said to have murdered) wandering about in Act I; at every opportunity Lohengrin was laying on the floor as if asleep. But as things progressed, I could see that wouldn’t work, and eventually the opera became about a wedding night that just went all wrong. Elsa (Annette Dasch) couldn’t adjust to not knowing who her husband Lohengrin (Jonas Kauffman). Well in real life what woman would? As with the Met Rigoletto production the people looked the roles; Kauffman so handsome and Dasch pretty, young, with flowing hair. but this was patently not real life as having them get themselves soaked and also go on about a swan no one had seen (like many another producer Guth just eliminated any attempt at an artificial swan) made clear.

The libretto had not been changed so Guth’s re-staging had nothing to do with the words. In the original play, the second act opens with the evil couple, Friedrich von Telramund (Tomas Tomasson) and his wife, Otrud (Evelyn Herlitzius) in bed together, having just fucked after coming home from some raucous drunken festival. Guth had them sitting at desk, trussed up like modern politicians in suits that were militaristic. Otrud’s outfits reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits (while running for president) or Angela Merkel today (the German chancellor). So the parallel with the bad wedding night for the good couple was lost and nothing gained as modern day politicians do not duel with one another so the scene in context made no sense at all:

Watching the sword-fight I was therefore alerted to them being performing singers who were up to this sort of training and gymnastics on a stage.

In other words, if the myth is silly (and misogynistic as the idea is women should be content to obey and know nothing), it doesn’t help to break the suspension of disbelief altogether. During the intermissions I had become reminded that La Scala as an Italian theater and this was opening night and patrons were not altogether pleased that Wagner instead of Verdi had been chosen. If this production failed in the live theater and was at moments ridiculous to the audience in the movie-house it was not the fault of the principles. As Martin kettle (who describes the sets too in the Guardian) says, Kauffman especially has a haunting voice and manner, Evelyn Herlitzius was theatrically effective as an ambitious woman:

Tomasson was a figure out a Michael Haneke movie about rigid Nazis (e.g., The White Ribbon). Again I enjoyed more minor character roles: Rene Pape as a solemn official was what is called luxury casting.

In a sentence: these productions had the effect of pointing up problems in the operas.

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I cannot say I was bored at either production; they were lessons in what one can and cannot do to older operas whose stories or themes have become unacceptable (embarrassing), outdated (the duke rapes Gilda and this is not “rat-pack” amusement) or I fear (in the case of Rigoletto as a disabled person) uncomfortable.

The Lohengrin setting at times was meant to look like a stage, to be self-reflexive (this seems to be a favorite motif this year). My favorite piece of the setting for Rigoletto were the chandeliers: they were exactly the same ludicrous artificial ones as in the real theater, but here the self-reflexivity seemed to me to mock the whole event. They are mechanical and go up and down. It was apparently felt chandeliers could not be done without in the palace the opera house was supposed to be; OTOH, you could not have them too elaborate or get in the way of seeing.

Operas were in the 19th century staged for people with money who wanted to be flattered into thinking themselves as rich and powerful as the people on their political and social stages. I’m all for exposing this worship of rank, wealth, the misogyny, reactionary nonsense, religious stupidities of myths. But it’s not easy to do with intransigent material when you also desire to please and attract an increasingly larger modern audience.

Mee-ee-ow …

Ellen

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Boston MLA: Public poetry; paintings & photos in films & novels; audio books; today’s French cinema

Tony Harrison’s is the voice-over; from the TV program aired Nov 4, 1987

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been four days since I reported on three of the 18th century MLA sessions I attended at the MLA held in Boston early this January, and more than a month since I described the trip, where we stayed and what we did outside the MLA.

I’ve got five sessions on poetry on TV and in community centers, on the radio; on paintings in film and doctored photos in graphic novels and newspapers. Two of the great pleasures of my existence — listening to a complete great book read brilliantly while driving my car, and watching the episodes of a long-running great mini-series nowadays mostly on my computer’s DVD player — were the topics of two more. The last I’ve put in my comments section, Agnes Vardes, French film families and how to make a cross-over French hit in contemporary cinema.

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Perhaps the best session in the whole of the MLA I went to was Public Poetry in Britain (No. 289, Jan 4th, Friday noon-1:15 pm) where I heard intelligent discussions and poetry read aloud beautifully either by the speaker or the poet on TV or tape: Emily Bloom on Louis MacNeice’s autobiographical poem, Autumn Sequel, and his career on the BBC radio; David R. Sherman on Tony Harrison and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s political communal poetry; Kelly C. MacPhail on Edwin Muir. Theme: how poets attempt public poetry, to be public poets.

Emily Bloom began with MacNeice’s 22 years as an Anglo-Irish personality on the BBC and then went on to Autumn Sequel, a terza rima poem, where MacNeice claimed that the BBC failed to create a public poetry world which reached out to the wide general audience of Britain. Radio even played a roll in the spread of fascism. He was angry at the BBC as cowardly, filled with hackwork. He did not leave because there was little alternative to the BBC if you wanted to be a responsible public poet. She chose stanza from the poem relevant to 2013; MacNeice needed to cross back into the private sphere to speak.

David Sherman contrasted the white traditions of art-folk poetry of Harrison to the Jamaican rhythmic music hall Reggae chanting renditions of African folk song of Johnson. Mr Sherman suggested that poems become public when the community can rally around the poet himself as object/subject of public memory. V is a 448 line poem where V stands for Victory, Victim, Versus. It’s a deeply anti-war poem, compassionate for working people from which Harrison comes. He stands in a snowy graveyard, remembers Leeds where he comes from and begins to read; we get images of police beating up strikers; of Mrs Thatcher with her fingers making a V sign for victory;we hear Scargill’s voice about how in his house there was one book, a Bible. The program was discussed in many newspapers; MPs publicly protested. We see him quietly reading to a group of what looks like well-educated people in a community center.

This makes a striking contrast to the dialect poetry sung by Linton Kwesi Johnson on a tape of a time in a night club. Johnson’s poems were performed around the time of a riot insurrection in Brixton where many black people were badly hurt, jailed. The lines are angry and accompanied by loud percussive instruments (very strong drums). The theme is how Black Britain has to re-invent itself and challenge the rest of the nation to accept them.

Kelly MacPhail’s talk on Edwin Muir was wide-ranging, about Muir’s life, his career, his personal friendships and conflicts especially with Hugh MacDiarmid. Muir involved himself in the political changes in Scotland as the Scottish slowly dealt with having been forcibly unified with England from 1707; Muir took changing positions but remained steadfast in his written Scots-English. He wanted to create a national (Scottish) poetry and this required (it was felt) a true language apart from that of the English. One language that had emerged was a dialect formed in the lowlands as a new standard form of Scots. This seemed to me the language that Burns used. This dialect is, however, much contested. His friend and rival, MacDiamid, who was born in Glasgow, where his parents and siblings died when he was young, went to Paris and studied French, seems to have supported this form of Scottish while late in life Muir (who had married a middle class woman who influenced him) argued poets had a choice of two languages: the genuine ancient Scots tongue, Gaelic, or modern English. Mr MacPhail read aloud from Muir’s Scottish Journey, written while Muir was depressed (1936), about the predicament of a Scottish sensibility who may have to adopt modern British English in order to be readable.

Can anyone speak for an entity called Great Britain?

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Scarlett Johansson and Tom Wilkinson in Girl with Pearl Earring

Origin of Tracey Chevalier’s book from which film adapted:

1665 painting by Vermeer

A crowded session I expect many of my readers might have enjoyed as much as I and Jim did occurred the day before, mid-afternoon (Jan 3rd, Thursday, 3:30-4:45 pm, No 90), I attended a rich session on Paintings and Photographs Remediated in Film, Graphic Narrative and Newspaper. David Richter gave another fine power-point presentation of a series of films, this time those using paintings. He began Rohmer’s Perceval where medieval painting shaped the visuals of the film; Rohmer wanted to thwart the viewer’s usual desires. He began with the idea that space in a painting is a static interior, while in a film it move and the screen is implicitly without boundaries. Paintings can be used as set decorations; as protagonists; as providing thematic context (for example in a movie where the characters are discussing war, Pascal’s Guernica is seen against the wall behind them); as paradigms for themes; they enable us to enter the century the film’s story occurs in; they justify symbolic presentations; they foreshadow; they set up parallels; they explain further. In each case he had specific movies which he played clips from and showed us the movie turning into a painting.

A young Colin Firth was the painter (as he later was Vermeer): here he contemplates his work and interprets the original painter’s intent and presence

Prof Richter had left out paintings painted for a film as rare. He did not seem to know of A Month in the County, a film adaptation by Simon Grey and Patrick O’Connor from J.L. Carr’s Booker prize gem novel; there a painting of a Last Judgement was made for the movie and the uncovering of it is central to the film.

Genie Giamo discussed the autobiographical graphic novels of Alison Bechtel, especially her Fun Home, where as in her other novels she lays bare the anguish, tragic events (her father may have killed himself) and fractured memories of her real family. Giamo told us Bechtel doctored the photos she had in order to present a story line about her family that concrete evidence does not support (though it may be true). Giamo defined remediation as a process whereby a pollutant is cleaned from an area; it makes environmental space less hazardous. By publishing her memoirs Bechtel rehabilitates the dark recesses of her mind and life; it’s an act of living in itself. This kind of memoir is done by other women; Bechtel’s also show a sense of humor like when her heroine-self says “I forget to get a job for the last 50 years.” Her family becomes a realistic Adams family. (She seemed to suggest that it didn’t matter whether the photos were “real” or undoctored or not. I disagree. The talk afterwards revealed what one might expect: Bechtel’s family were angry about the books.)

A typical mix of photos and drawings with revealing utterances by Bechtel’s father

A third presentation by Lisa Zunshine was about how people communicate by misinformation and miscommunication, and how art seeks to flatter us into thinking we see inside characters and read photographs and visuals accurately. We are invited to be superior voyeurs. She showed the photograph that was printed in US newspapers of Obama, Hillary Clinton and other people high in Obama’s administration watching the murder of Osama bin Laden, and wanted us to see the interpretations given the people in the photo were imposed by stereotypical preconceptions. The people at the session found her lively sceptical presentation effective.

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Six volume Oxford edition of Barchestershire novels

Jim and I were glad we stayed late that Thursday night to attend a session on a type of TV drama I’m addicted to: Serial TV across Boundaries (No. 169, 7:00-8:15 pm). From Kathryn Van Arendonk I had the rare treat of a paper on Trollope and the mini-series, Northern Exposure. As I’ve been pointing to in my blogs on Downton Abbey, Trollope’s serial art is analogous in forms and motifs to serial drama on TV. Northern Exposure gives us a case where a mini-series changed its stories to de-emphasize the male protagonist to give us a portrait of an on-going community, causing the male lead to sue. A love triangle, a place where people gather (bar) become shaping forces. Trollope’s Barchester series shows the same re-forming to create a narrative system, whose preludes or codas can occur in a previous or later novel. The material is capable of perpetual proliferation.

Sean O’Sullivan’s talk on Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective has led me to rent this series from Netflix. Michael Gambon plays an obscure fiction writer in hospital with a painful and ugly skin disease. The BBC allowed Potter creative latitude so that the series was built by putting together fragments of memory; individual episodes were independent of others (they could stand alone) within 3 interwoven stories. We see time unfold with the different floors of the hospital representing different phases of the protagonist’s life; all is integrated with music. The films investigated the personal and communal experience.

A advertising poster for the movie-house version of the film, Mulholland Drive

Jason Mittel’s talk was on Mulholland Drive, which he argued is today a much acclaimed but misunderstood movie because it originated as a mini-series. The pilot episode was re-designed to be a self-contained film to allow the producers to release it to commercial theaters. He showed how the interpretations of the movie as now constituted bring out how a serial film has an uncanny dream-like underlying structure.

The talk afterward was stimulating. Ms Van Arendook said one could learn much by showing how a tightly-knit classic novel (say Austen’s Emma) was changed when it was turned into serial art. It was here I heard what I’ve come to see is true of Dickens: he breaks up his narrative so as to erase their original instalment publication pattern. People deplored the tendency at HBO in the last decade or so to go for the 6 hour mini-series in lieu of the 13-hour one.

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To me the most personally gratifying was a session very early Saturday morning (Jan 5th, No. 432, 8:30-9:45 am) called Aural Communications and Close Listening. For years I’ve listened to people apologizing for listening to audio books, explaining (half-apologetically, self-deprecatingly) that listening is almost or as good as silent reading; or, assertions that such experiences must be inferior: you can’t control the speed of the utterance, have no text in front of you & so on. (Well you can control it, you can rewind or click ahead and back, and who says you can’t have a text in front of you or consult it before or later? Many audiobooks come with a downloadable e-text nowadays.

Philip Madoc’s reading and Andrew Davies’ mini-series showed me the reactionary reading of this book is all wrong

Matthew Rubery did more than answer these objections & explain their origins; he defended listening to books as different and sometimes better than silent reading. It is a new embarrassment, because until the later 19th century one form of entertainment in reading households was for the group of people to sit round a fire and listen to someone read aloud a book that was written to be read aloud — as most good novels are. Why do people question the “legitimacy” of aural communication: besides the two I’ve already cited: it’s felt they threaten close or deep reading; the reader is passive and allowing someone else “to do the work” of interpretation; they are abridged. The one objection that he let stand was they are often abridged and abridged poorly, leaving just the bare-bones of a plot. But one need not buy or rent an abridged book.

Two of my favorite readers made this book a deep love of mine

The defense: the narrator is an imagined voice in the book and the reader-narrator is bringing this to life; acoustic performances can deepen and enrich your experience of the book. You are led to see nuances and feelings you might not on your own. Logically, the more times you listen to different readers, the more you see in your book. I’ve listened to whole Trollope novels read aloud by different narrators and can vouch for that. Audio books offer sensuous resonating language when the reader’s voice is trained. (I just love David Case’s voice.) They help you understand the book, and can bring out its ideology. Im a sense audiobooks function the way film adaptations or stage dramatizations do only the text is not change. If their interpretation differs from yours, no one stops you from reading the book on your own. It can be difficult to discern paratexts but a good reader will include (by dropping his or her voice) a footnote, the introduction, notes.

Audio books also enable the phenomenon of the secondary activity while reading. For me listening to books turns what would be excruciatingly frustrated time in traffic jams into privileged time. Some people exercise, others clean their houses; they jog and walk their dogs. There is the wonderful element of imagined company. The drawbacks that Rubery registered were 1) the tendency of these companies to chose voices whose intonation are upper class, thus reinforcing false associations of value with one set of aural sounds rather than another; and 2) that it is difficult to find out what’s out there once an audio company goes out of business or is bought out by a larger company. The profit motive and fear of free downloaders makes the companies unwilling to pool their information into any standard source.

The second speaker, Cornelius Collins, talked about how in our culture the visual dominates the aural so that the aural is not sufficiently discussed and less money is spent on top-of-the-line sound mix and/or readers. Music today is massively compromised to fit i-tune requirements. Audio books are not compiled in a central place and the amateur readers remain under-rated, ignored. Much that is recorded is quickly in danger of being lost within a couple of years. Collins asked, What does it mean to listen closely? citing Peter Zendy’s Listen: A History of our Ears (about how to critically listen), said the way to do this is break the experience into segments (the way one does a movie). We need to discuss it and find a vocabulary for the quality of sound and someone’s tones.

More briefly: Justin St Clair discussed the new phenomenon of novels published as sound tracks, or with sounds of music accompanying them (hybridized reading); Linda Hutcheon’s Adaptation has a section on this new book. One problem here is the sound track is used as an ad for the book, and do not provide a meaningful atmosphere. Lisa Hollenback’s talk was on poetry and music on MP3s. These invite nostalgia is the recording is from time past. Vast websites on line provide experiences of sharing, swapping recordings. Music and story listening become social activities experienced in partly-imagined communities. It is much easier to collect and list music that’s recorded than books because of the free on-line collections.

********************

Izzy and I saw the Agnes Vardes’s film, The Beaches of Agnes (it is every bit that good) that was part of the discussion of Contemporary French film (Jan 5th, Saturday, 10:15-11:30, No. 479). I almost missed the session because the title of the paper no where indicated she was its central subject.

Agnes Vardes speaking at a retrospective series at the Harvard Film Archive

See comments.

Ellen

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An Iconic Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln

Gentle reader,

See it. Don’t miss. It’s riveting, suspenseful (we get to watch an election vote-by-vote — without computer, without Fox News — what more American?), gritty. People every once in a while insult one another gleefully. Says Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens to a racist conservative democrat I don’t believe in equality because I know you, you idiot, bigot, loud-mouthed animal are not my equal; I just want everyone to be equal before the law, even you. Of course there’s a myth wrapped up in that as there are many in the film you have to think about later, such as the idea that real liberty for black people was won with the 13th amendment. The film has the usual flaws of such films (e.g.,like Amazing Grace; “history as progress narrative“). Still it has much to deliver. If you don’t want to bother read on, that’s what I have to say tonight. The rest is why and how the film is good and where are some flaws.

I can’t know what you’ve read about Spielberg’s Lincoln (Anthony Lane’s “House Divided“?), screenplay Tony Kushner, focusing on Lincoln’s determined effort to have his Congress pass the 13th amendment to the US constitution, outlawing chattel slavery. I’m writing about the film because I was very moved by it — along with (it seemed to me) most people in a heavily crowded mixed-race auditorium at my local semi-art cinema in Northern Virginia. I might have said “despite its iconic material” but know it’s because of the iconic nature of its material that in this year 2012 this story, these characters are quickened with wrought up life. What US child has not been exposed to scenes of civil war carnage, the millions dead, the bloody bloody battles, the archetypal figures of Lee all formal frozen elegance and Grant taking off his hat at Appomattox. Lincoln? You cannot do such scenes ironically or as comedy. Are we still not fighting the civil war in our other present damaging wars? This is a movie about us today, about racism, about whether you believe in equality of all (whites against whites too); its issues have not yet been resolved it seems. When near the close Jackie Earle Dailey as a weasel-like Alexander Stevens, negotiating for the confederacy will not concede that it’s not a question of two countries at war but one in dire conflict, nor that anyone has the right to free “the property” of the confederate wealth, we are hearing a variant of this year’s unspoken elite-control versus egalitarian-liberty, Romney/Ryan-versus-Obama/Clinton clashes.

Historical films worth seeing are about today in disguise and present their issues ambivalently. I thought this would be like in type to two season’s ago The King’s Speech, a mini-series inside 2 and 1/2 hours, film adaptation (of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals) with Lewis taking the Colin Firth eloquent hero role. It’s not. After all these mini-series are a British form. This is not an intellectual’s film — though it helps if you know your American history, the more about this period of the civil war, these individuals the better: such as Stevens was beaten viciously so that he was nearly crippled, had a black mistress-housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton smith [played by S. Epatha Merkerson) he loved dearly. It’s like wholesome American TV: Ken Burns stuff.

Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens

Also it helps to know your cinema. Film-makers like to quote. This one quotes The Talk of the Town (1942). At the close of the forever unforgettable TOTN after Ronald Colman’s risks his career appointment as a justice to the supreme court, and gets the position, we see him walk away from home (from the back) from the POV of his endlessly loving, smiling older independent minded male black valet who has just made sure Colman is wearing the right jacket, so at the close of Lincoln, we watch Lewis walk away from home on the fatal night of his assassination (yes Spielberg neglects no buttons) from the POV of William Slade as his endlessly loving, smiling older male black valet who was never a slave and has just tried to make sure Mr Lincoln wears his gloves. This kind of worshipfulness of the great (white noble) man by the superior (black intelligent) “everyman” is still with us. We also have an obligatory scene between Lincoln as great (white) man taught by an ordinary (black) person, this time a woman, Gloria Reuben as Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s “colored” maid: Mrs Keckley encourages Mr Lincoln to go on with his determination to pass the 13th amendment after his wife has such raged against his refusal to try to make peace above all and at any price because now their son has enlisted.

The Lincoln family (Mr, Mrs, her maid) at the theater

There are still far too few black people in the film. It’s too much a small group of white men saving the world (something one finds in many a commercial historical film). Lincoln opens on Lincoln talking to two black men, one of whom I recognized as the powerful black male lead of Small Island, David Oyelowo. He did not appear again after the initial scene, opening scene where Lewis was Lincoln as Henry V listening to the men who fight:

Oyelowo wants to know why black men are paid less

Izzy told me biopics often begin with the death of the central figure. One of the mistakes of this film was to fast forward at its close to Lincoln’s death so we could then have a retrospective drenched in nostalgia and loss where we see and hear at long last one of Lincoln’s many stump speeches delivered to a huge crowd. I’ve read these. They have much Biblical language, but are simple direct passionate denunciations of slavery, eloquent defenses of equality (in the mode of Burns’s “a man’s a man for aye that”). I’d hoped we’d have more of them and earlier. The choice was rather to show us Lincoln at home (undoing Mary’s corset, arguing fiercely with her over their son, reminiscing and looking forward to the traveling future they would not have), Lincoln with his cabinet, with his son, with his hired band of half-drunk bribers, one-on-one with this or that person. Or alone, at a distance, privately ruminating. He is all height, a concave shadow, who walks awkwardly as if he doesn’t want to take up the space his body needs, his hands oddly strength-less.

No one can say that Lewis’s performance is one of impersonation as we have no tapes of Lincoln, only the words of his speeches, what he and others wrote down about him in life, his writing to be read — these Lewis delivers with an understated held-back, soft, low startlingly (if you remember his usual cut-glass accent in Room with a View, his cockney in My Beautiful Laundrette) western American set of vowels circa 1860; his whole posture is of laid back, withdrawn power brought forth fully when periodically force is called for. It does work because none of the speeches are wooden lines of narrative or ideas fed the audience in the way of BBC/PBS style mini-series costume-historical film drama. The character talks naturally. He can pronounce, but he is also witty (“joyful to be comprehended” he mutters at one point to James Spader as Bilbo who anachronistically greets Lincoln with “I’ll be fucked” what are you doing here?),

Spader as Bilbo in the House

He is conflicted, deep in thought, worried, austere and icy too. at moments I wondered if Lewis had Obama in mind.

It may be taken as a rebuff to Obama since central to what happens is how Lincoln will not give in. He will pass the 13th amendment before ending the war lest the peace legalities find his Emancipation Proclamation does not apply post-war situation. He fights and fights hard, using all weapons, from a crew of coarse bribing networker-enforcers who bully, pressure, manipulate to get the necessary votes. When Lincoln is needed in the last days, he’s there in the thick of it, finding out individuals and persuading them. As Obama often has failed to and so given up what he should not have or not gotten what he should.

Too much radiance, too much plaintive music. Far too little sense of history as a group of forces. Ang Lee’s Ride to the Devil did that (also civil war), and somehow Lee managed to avoid cliched scenes (he’s not American himself), but Ang Lee’s film was trashed by the studios (they did not advertise it) and it flopped. Sally Field as Mary Lincoln made too dense or again too seething. But it has to have the rhetoric debates, the scenes of corpses, the songs, the lines of men in blue or grey.

I’ve an idea Spielberg made the film because the matter is iconic.

But there are also some funny moments, and wry jokes here and there (Kushner wrote it): Lane caught Mary Lincoln’s just think “four more years in this terrible house”. I loved Lincoln’s fondly told long-drawn out gentle joke-y tales, with their indirect relevance. When Lincoln moves into gnomic poetry mode, and David Stratairn as Steward beyond patience, exasperated into complaint, cries aloud “I have no idea what you are talking about,” I laughed aloud. I laughed aloud several times in the movie when no one near me did.

So go and you too can get to appreciate the jokes no one sitting near you does.

Ellen

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The picture: unfinished business

Dear friends and readers,

Jim and I are not entirely through with coping with my mother’s estate, we still have some stuff to do about the money she left, which has come to me. Sunday, though, we finished the physical things. This is the story of unfinished business going back to 1971/2.

Shortly after I left my first husband and was living with my parents in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant (for a few weeks before I was to go to England), I found myself wandering in an department store. I no longer remember why. I came across this picture I just fell in love with. I didn’t know the artist’s name and still don’t. It was not an original — it was just a print. But it seemed to contain in it a vision of a mood, a life, a lifestyle that had deep appeal. I knew most of NYC city didn’t look like this row of picturesque brownstones through which one could view a young woman walking quietly. It has something of a feel of my favorite painter, Pissaro. I wished I could live in a part of a city that at least faintly resembled it. Its frame was plain wood and the cost $14.00.

Readers of this blog or the list-servs I post to will know how much I care about pictures.

I took it home. It was not easy since I had to bring it by subway. Then I hung it over my new cherry wood bed. It had come with string and all I needed to do was bang a couple of nails in the wall. When it came time to go to England, I knew I couldn’t take it with me. It was way too big. I had to leave it with my parents in the apartment they had just moved into in Fresh Meadows. This was 1967/68.

Fast forward a couple of years later I had returned from England, was now married to Jim and I came to my parents’ apartment. There was that picture again, but now it hung over the central sofa in the living room. Alas, my father had to some extent ruined it. He had re-framed it with an “better” wood frame that had a gold lining in it. It didn’t fit it. It was too pompous. He admitted that was so. It had become his picture in appearance as well as possession. What else would he put over that couch.

So I said nothing.

Well when we came to clear out my parents’ apartment, bag and box everything and remove what we wanted, I almost didn’t take it with me. I still couldn’t bear that new frame. Further, the picture itself had faded and embrowned over the years. (It’s not as dark as it appears in this blog; that’s the result of the darkness of the corridor.) Morning I used to think in the city was the best time of day, the time before people’s faces took on the growing anxieties and stresses of the day. But who would hire someone to clean a print that had cost $14 30 years ago? It had lost that early morning freshness of colors it had had. Also where would we put it in the truck. It was silly of me to care. It was self-indulgent in a way I couldn’t find reason for. Yet I wanted it. As Izzy wanted the china lazy Susan in the front of the house, and a small reproduction of a fin-de-siecle painting (cost $3 in a supermarket sale) that was in the front room.

In the end I took the Susan, small painting and my large one home. My big painting took up the side panel of the truck and it got scratched. Since I decided on this the last moment, the Lazy Susan didn’t get properly wrapped and one of the china pieces got smashed.

Still she was happy with them. She put the three (one chipped) on the round thing that swings about and now has her pencils, pens and other things in it on her new cherry wood hutch and desk affair that stretches from her desk to Laura’s now ex-desk with a new wide-framed TV on it.

When I got my picture inside though, it was not clear where I could put it. We have 54 bookcases. Most of our walls are covered and those which are not have favorite pictures already. There is Jim’s three Italian sloops in the front room. He found that similarly, took it to work in the Pentagon, and the day he retired brought it home.

It was more like $30.00, but then this was 30 years later he bought it.

Walls with small ones: an acqua nymph on a rock, looking dreamily up from the waters to the sky; an Alma Tadema in black-and-white of pseudo-classical figures listening to someone read aloud Virgil (these from auctions); from thrift antique shops, some commedia dell’arte figures sitting and wandering wearily in a park where some kind of masquerade is occurring; and this print of an engraving in bad shape of a salon with a gentlewoman to the side holding (cuddling) a cat:

A Chardin of musical instruments:

But I did have behind the door in the hall and over the small thin bookcase (with audio books), a stretch of wall that had a sort of reproduction of a Monet of an exhibit from a museum in France that I really didn’t care for. Had it had been a Pissaro that would have been different. Would this fit? just? and how could I put it up? My father had taken away the original string set.

Well yesterday Laura and Rob brought over their drill. I had bought a new string set from Home Depot, and voila Rob put it up so it was straight and beautifully cover the whole wall. The bookcase under it prevents the door from slamming at it. It’s a bit dark in that corridor since there is no window and just one light bulb so you can’t tell how the painting needs a cleaning and the frame somehow loses its prominence.

I had held it against my father that he had gotten my painting. I had acquiesced in giving it up because he had made it his by that frame. But over the years it had become his, it had somehow in my mind stood for where we did share a taste, for he liked it as much as I did — though could not just leave it be, had had to make it conform to some imposed norm of impressiveness. But then when he had done it, he saw he had lost part of its charm.

So, at long last I got it back. But I got it back with this new meaning, that it had been his, but time has now reverted it back into being mine through the operation of shabbiness.

Almost there.

Ellen

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Stevie Smith: Cats in Colour

NODDING

Tizdal my beautiful cat
Lies on the old rag mat
In front of the kitchen fire.
Outside the night is black.

The great fat cat
Lies with his paws under him
His whiskers twitch in a dream,
He is slumbering.

The clock on the mantlepiece
Ticks unevenly, tic toe, tic-toe,
Good heavens what is the matter
With the kitchen clock?

Outside an owl hunts,
Hee hee hee hee,
Hunting in the Old Park
From his snowy tree.
What on earth can he find in the park tonight,
It is so wintry?

Now the fire burns suddenly too hot
Tizdal gels up to move,
Why should such an animal
Provoke our love?

The twigs from the elder bush
Are tapping on the window pane
As the wind sets them tapping,
Now the tapping begins again.

One laughs on a night like this
In a room half firelight half dark
With a great lump of a cat
Moving on the hearth,
And the twigs tapping quick,
And the owl in an absolute fit
One laughs supposing creation
Pays for its long plodding
Simply by coming to)his-
Cat, night, fire-and a girl nodding.

Drawing by Stevie Smith for her poem, Nodding

Dear friends and readers,

This is at least my fifth blog on a text about or with cats. Marge Piercy’s memoir, Sleeping with Cats, Doris Lessing’s On Cats, Boswell and Piozzi on Dr Johnson and Hodge, not to omit Temple Grandin who reminded me how much animals love to eat, how happy it makes them (Animals in Translation) and various poems (Elsa Morante’s “Minna the Siamese” comes to mind).

They’ve been multiplying since I adopted two cats, Clary (green-eyed tortoiseshell) and Ian (yellow-eyed male ginger tabby). I’ve learned that one knows nothing about why people like cats until one owns one. Cats are private creatures, showing their selves only to their “persons” or special friend and family. You can’t get to know a cat unless you live with him or her, and then it takes time. They do not perform for strangers. Stevie says we have made them nervous. I know they do not like changes in routine; we should do precisely the same things each day at the same time. If we deviate, they marginalize themselves, watching suspiciously until we all return to our routs again.

I told a friend about the 1978 movie, Stevie, with Glenda Jackson, how quiet and truthful it is about a writing life. My friend had noticed my Lessing and Hodge blogs and told me about a review Stevie Smith had written about a book intended to make as permanent as photos and books can a beauty contest among cats, Cats in Colour. It’s in her Uncollected Writings, Me Again, made up of poems, short prose, pictures by herself. Smith’s several-page review’s delightful, intriguing, melancholy, like her writing, has so many moods all at once, and (most unusual for a review) includes drawings and poems. It’s very hard to do justice to this prose, it’s genius-level, the points of view so much at variance and yet the perspectives all coming together to focus again and again on how there are two worlds here: “the Human Creatuere and the Animal” and how we do not respect “the Animal World.”

This descriptive section will have to do:

It is not only the cats of antiquity that seem so peculiar (3,000 years may allow some difference in form) but … scaled to the size of a thin mouse, as we observe an Egyptian puss, couched beneath his master’s chair? The Grecian cats, though better scaled, seem dull and the cats of our Christian era not much better. There is a horrible cat drawing in Topsell’s The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes, dated 1607; there he sits, this cat, with a buboe on his hip, frozen and elaborate. In every line of this drawing, except for the cold sad eyes, the artist wrongs cathood. Quick sketchers do better, by luck perhaps. We all know Lear’s drawings of his fat cat Foss. There is true cathood here, though much, too, of course, of Mr Lear, so ‘pleasant to know’. Quick sketchers too can catch the cat in movement, and, though much addicted to, and fitted for, reclining, the cat moves-gallops, leaps, climbs and plays-with such elegance, one must have it so. Yet only this morning, I saw a cat quite motionless that looked so fine I could not have disturbed it. Hindways on, on top of a gray stone wall, its great haunches spred out beyond the wall’s narrow ledge,this animal was a ball of animate ginger fur; no shape but a ball’s, no head, no tail that was visible, had this old cat, but he caught all there was of winter sunshine and held it.

She leaves the book of glossy photographs, the excuse for her reverie, way behind. It does seem as if this review was actually intended to be printed as the introduction to said book.

She opens by saying cats reflect the egoism and ambition of their owners, even those not engineered into breeds and made expensive because rarer. She just wished this book had had photos of ashcan and ordinary poor and feral and wild cats “alongside” the beauties. Not that misery reveals cat-nature any more than beauty. Its cat-nature, cat-facts, cat-intransigence she’s on about in her review — as these impinge on and affect us. She concentrates and repeatedly returns to cat’s eyes: “blank and shining,” enigmatic, in themselves the eyeball expressionless. Finally or ultimately we can’t reach them nor they us, no matter how hard either side tries. She finds embarrassing and distressing how the cat does try so hard to reach us — it’s yearning gestures, its needs, and she’s more comfortable with its savage ruthless behaviors, predatory, play-bites.

As she launches into her descriptions of cat-lives, she inhabits the same territories as Lessing. She thinks we do cats a disservice by “fixing” them. We are depriving them of a real experience of cat-life — maternal duties, sexual prowess. She does know many live tragic lives, die helplessly. Nervous creatures they are, “like all tamed animals” given reason to be by us, our love as well as easy cruelty, power over them.

The last portion of the review provides what we know of cats in history, from the earliest figures to today, and writes with real plangency when she talks of how cats were burnt with women as witches — their helpers you see (an aspect of misogyny though she does not use such terms since cats are associated with women living alone). Our cruelties to cats:

witchcraft is too grim a story for here and its rites too cruel for our pampered pets. Yet I remembered the witch legends of history, as when the Scottish witches were accused of attempting the death of the King and Queen on their sea-passage home to Scotland. The witches swam a cat off the coast of North Berwick, having first christened it ‘Margaret’, they cast it into the sea to drown and thus-they said-raise a storm-wind to sink the King’s ship. For this they were convicted and burnt, for the Scots law was crueller than ours and sent witches to the stake, while we only hanged them. But in both countries the poor cat that belonged to the witch, if he was ‘apprehended’, might also suffer death by burning or hanging.

She also tells stories of individual cats she has known — like Lessing again. She describes one costuming of a cat as an angel which is really a debased bridal picture and rightly calls it “depraved.” She liked to see galloping cats (and has a poem in her the Collected Poems on “Galloping Cats”). To watch them in movement, streaking, hunting. Apparently she enjoyed teasing her cat. I can’t do that. At the very end there are stories of “good cats” and a poem reminding me of Dr Johnson and Hodge, about “Major” “a very fine cat.”

The Story of a Good Cat. This was the cat who came to the cruel cold prison in which Richard III had cast Sir Henry Wyatt when young. Because of his Lancastrian sympathies Henry had already beenimprisoned several times, and even put to the torture. The cat saved his life by drawing pigeons into the cell which the gaoler agreed to cook and dress for the poor prisoner, though for fear of his own life he dared not by other means increase his diet. There is a picture of Sir Henry as an old man sitting in a portrait with the prison cell for background and the cat, a peculiar sad-looking little cat, drawing a pigeon through the prison bars. Underneath is
written, but so faintly it is difficult to read, ‘This Knight with
hunger, cold and care neere starved, pyncht, pynde away, The sillie
Beast did fee de, heat, cheere with dyett, warmth and playe.

Remember how Christopher Smart’s cat, Geoffrey comforted him?

We have cat fables and fairy stories where all the characters are cats. And she skilfully recreates the atmosphere of an Algernon Blackwood gothic story whose center is a feel for the presence of cats:

there is a young man of French descent who is travelling in France on holiday. Suddenly the train he is on pulls up at a little station and he feels he must get down at this station. The inn he goes to is sleepy and comfortable,the proprietress is also sleepy and comfortable, a large fat lady who moves silently on little fat feet. Everybody in this inn treads silently, and all the people in the town are like this too, sleepy, heavy and treading softly. After a few days the young man begins to wonder; and at night, waking to look out over the ancient roof-tops, he wonders still more. For there is a sense of soft movement in the air, of doors opening softly, of soft thuds as soft bodies drop to the ground from wall or window; and he sees the shadows moving too. It was the shadow of a human being that dropped from the wall, but the shadow moved on the ground as a cat runs, and now it was not a human being but a cat. So in the end of course the young man is invited by the cat-girl, who is the plump inn owner’s daughter and serves by day in the inn, to join ‘the dance’ that is the witch’s sabbath. For this old French town is a mediaeval witch-town and bears the past alive within it. Being highminded, as most ghost-writers are, Blackwood makes the young man refuse the invitation and so come safe off with his soul, which had been for a moment much imperilled.

Me I like to watch them looking happy and also when they play with one another games which show them capable of semi-planning and tricking one another. I enjoy how they have favorite toys they carry about in their mouths. Ian has a string, Clary a furry looking object once meant for a mouse. Poor pussycats when they get themselves in trouble. I enjoy when they vocalize at me. I say “miaow” back and “I know” and “just so” and “I agree.” They are talking. Smith in Collected Poems has this love lyric to cats, the “eth” verbs turning it into a hymn:

The Singing Cat

It was a little captive cat
    Upon a crowded train
His mistress takes him from his box
    To ease his fretful pain.

She holds him tight upon her knee
    The graceful animal
And all the people look at him
    He is so beautiful.

But oh he pricks and oh he prods
    And turns upon her knee
Then lifteth up his innocent voice
    In plaintive melody.

He lifteth up his innocent voice
    He lifteth up, he singeth
And to each human countenance
    A smile of grace he bringeth.

He lifteth up his innocent paw
    Upon her breast he clingeth
And everybody cries, Behold
    The cat, the cat that singeth.

He lifteth up his innocent voice
    He lifteth up, he singeth
And all the people warm themselves
    In the love his beauty bringeth.

Someone said to me when I praised Lessing’s book as non-sentimental, nonsense, it’s all sentiment. Quite right. So too Smith’s essay. We try not to be but do not succeed.

Here’s my free translation of Morante’s poem, applying it to Clary. I told myself I liked the non-sentimental ending but probably I found appealing Morante’s attempt to capture cat-behavior.

Clary the tortie

I’ve a tiny beast, a cat named Clary.

Whatever I place on her plate, she eats
Whatever I pour into her bowl, she drinks.

Onto my knees she comes, gazes at me,
turns, sleeping tranquilly, so I forget
she’s there. If, remembering, I name her,
sleeping, her ear quivers, trembles, this name
then casts a dark shadow athwart her rest.

Blitheful, she has by her a muffled
tinkling stringed instrument, crinkling thanks
so sweet in play, I pet and I scratch her
turning neck & small upheld head, nudge, nudge.

If I consider history, time, things
separating us, disquiet comes. Alone:
of this she knows nothing. If then I watch
her play with string, her eye color tinted
by the sky, I yield. Laughter re-takes me.

When days off, for people, for us, make time
festive, pity comes to me for her who can’t
distinguish. That she too may celebrate,
for her meal I give her canned tuna fish.
She doesn’t understand why, but blissful
with her sharp teeth snips, gnaws, swallows away.

The Gods, to offer her some weapon, have
given her nails and teeth, but she, such her
gentleness, has adopted them for games.
Pity comes again for her whom I could
kill with impunity, no trial, no hell
thought of, no remorse, prisons. Just not there

She kisses me so much, licks and licks, I’ve
the illusion that she cherishes me.
I know another mistress or me to her
is all the same. She follows me about
as if to fool me that I am all to her
but I know my death would graze her but lightly …

(from Elsa Morante, Alibi, Poèmes, Édition bilingue, French translations by Jean-Noel Schifano)

****************

A New Yorker cartoon from a couple of weeks ago

I will though end on some unsentimental poetry and warn my reader these demand a strong stomach. They are not by any of the above writers. First up, an post-WW1 & 2 German poet, Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-74). This Rufus (I allude to Lessing’s Rufus), like some of us when so badly hurt, enraged, could not be brought back:

Die Katze

The Cat

The cat that someone found sat in a construction site and screamed.
The first night and the second and the third night.
The first time, passing by, not thinking of anything,
He carried the scream in his ears, heard it waking from a deep sleep.
The second time he bent down over the snow-covered ditch,
Trying in vain to coax out the shadow prowling around there.
The third time he jumped down, fetched the animal,
Called it cat, because no other name occurred to him.
And the cat stayed with him seven days.
Her fur stood on end, refused to be smoothed.
When he came home at night, she leapt on his chest, boxed his ears.
The nerve in her left eye twitched constantly.
She leapt up onto the curtains in the hall, dug in with her claws,
Swung back and forth, so the iron rings rattled.
She ate up all the flowers he brought home.
She knocked vases off the table, tore up the petals.
She didn’t sleep at night, sat at the foot of his bed
Looking up at him with burning eyes.
After a week the curtains were torn to shreds,
His kitchen was strewn with garbage. He did nothing anymore,
Didn’t read, didn’t play the piano,
The nerve of his left eye twitched constantly.
He had made her a ball out of silver paper,
Which she had scorned for a long time. On the seventh day
She lay in wait, shot out,
Chased the silver ball. On the seventh day
She leapt up onto his lap, let herself by petted, and purred.
Then he felt like a person with great power.
He rocked her, brushed her, tied a ribbon around her neck.
But in the night she escaped, three floors down,
And ran, not far, just to the place where he
Had found her. Where the willows’ shadows
Moved in the moonlight. Back in the same place
She flew from rock to rock in her rough coat
And screamed.

(from The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to Now, ed. trans. Susan Cocalis)

Smith says it’s better to love your cat to the point of folly than not to love them at all. And she has a passage that takes into account the same insight as Kaschnitz:

We were now swimming above a sandbank some half mile or so out from the shore. Presently the sandbank broke surface and we
climbed out and stood up on it. All around us was nothing but the sea and the sand and the hot still air. Look, I said, what is this coming? (It was a piece of wreckage that was turning round in the current by the sandbank and coming towards us.) Why, I said, it is a cat. And there sure enough, standing spitting upon the wooden spar was a young cat. We must get it in, said Caz, and stretched out to get it. But I saw that the cat was not spitting for the thought of its plight — so far from land, so likely to be drowned-but for a large sea-beetle that was marooned upon the spar with the cat, and that the cat was stalking and spitting at. First it backed from the beetle with its body arched and its tail stiff, then, lowering its belly to the spar, it crawled slowly towards the beetle, placing its paws carefully and with the claws well out. Why look, said Caz, its jaws are chattering. The chatter of the teeth of the hunting cat could now be heard as the spar came swinging in to the sandbank. Caz made a grab for the spar, but the young cat, its eyes dark with anger, pounced upon his hand and tore it right across. Caz let go with a start and the piece of wreckage swung off at right angles and was already far away upon the current. We could not have taken it with us, I said, that cat is fighting mad, he does not wish to be rescued, with his baleful eye and his angry teeth chattering at
the hunt, he does not wish for security.

And second, Hilary Mantel, her final devastating critique of life in Saudi Arabia is in her last paragraph of Eight Months on Ghazza Street: how relieved she is not to have to see the state of their cats, like ours, an emblem of us:

The street cats swarmed over the wall, looking for shelter, and dragged themselves before the glass. She watched them: scared cats, starving, alive with vermin, their faces battered, their broken limbs, set crooked, their fur eaten away. She felt she could no longer live with doing nothing for these cats. Slow tears leaked out of her eyes.

Ellen

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Three nights & days in Manhattan

Bryant Park, at the back of the NYPL, since 1992 a vibrant area where we had breakfast each morning (croissant and coffee)

Dear friends and readers,

Duty brought Jim and I to New York City this past week: we had to help make a decision about how and where my aging frail mother (now 90) is to live, and, as we had expected some of our time during the week was devoted to this. This blog is not about this search, discussions, and decision with relatives (she will go into what’s called assisted living), but rather what the need to come back to the city caused us to do so we can visit more regularly and our time away itself as an exhilarating rejuvenating holiday. People people everywhere, we were knee deep in people wherever we went. And the culture I record is one which is a cooperative reaction to having so many people in a small space. You make way for people on the sidewalk, you weave in and out, so social street events are mass cooperative moments where all try to enjoy something in life side-by-side.

It’s a large room with TVs and blown-up photos of Princeton looking idyllic on the walls: one commercial: “Join the 1%!”

About five years ago, the Williams Club closed its doors (on 37th St just off Madison Ave), and since then, Jim and I have not found anywhere to stay that we found to be comfortable and (for what we experienced) worth the money asked. We had been there since Jim is a graduate of Columbia University (math) and Columbia does not have its own “clubhouse” (as the buildings are called), and had resisted moving to Princeton (on 43rd St just off 5th Ave). It’s more expensive and maybe we would not find it as “home-y.” We gave in, re-joined and the event showed us this rooms are much nicer (bigger, airier), there are more amenities, such as a working library; a front drawing-assembly sort of room, open from noon to 6 where one can find coffee, tea, comfortable tables and chairs, working computers attached to the Internet, and yes lovely chess and backgammon tables too; a nice gym; a interminably open bar (with snacks), dining and breakfast rooms open much of the time. Like the Williams, it has staff who sponsor events like parties, lectures, tours, singles nights. There are conference groups. It’s located more centrally: close to Tickets, a block away from Bryant Park, within walking distance of several museums, parks and of course subway and bus anywhere in the city.

We liked the place that much that we have booked again for early October as that is our 43rd or 44th wedding anniversary, depending on how you count it. We were married 43 years ago October 6th, at 1:30 pm in a Leeds registry office (that’s Leeds, England, up north), but we were also married a year to the night we met, an October 6th, 1968. My joke is I invited him back for coffee and he never left. A JASNA and Burney Society meeting is also occurring that week, and I’ll attend the Burney group whose panels are meeting in a building on 44th St off 5th Avenue.

Beyond drinking, eating, relaxing, talking with congenial people we met there (as we used to in the Williams Club), my reading (including Doris Lessing’s delightful and profound On Cats, on which I’ll write separately) and Jim watching movies using his laptop (one of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde), what did we do that renewed our relationship, brought us closer too once again?

We walked from 43rd and 5th to 30th Street and 10th Avenue and climbed the stairs up to the new HighLine Park. Part of its deep gratifying pleasure is you remember the intensely crowded and noisy streets you had to wade through before you can “get on.” The stairways are places where people get on and get off. This meandering narrow walk with natural seeming greenery, flowers, bushes all along turns those parts of the city next to it into art works as you see them from the perspective of this park — from alleyways to buildings you walk among. The view over to the Hudson is spectacular. The place is quiet, people strolling, sitting, playing and listening to music, reading, just looking out. We exhausted our knees as we couldn’t resist staying on to the end when we debouched around the Village and found a nearby restaurant where we were relieved to sit and have a decent meal out on the sidewalk and watch “the world” go by. We had watched others on the Highline probably also seeing us.

Had we known, we could and would have watched the 1954 movie, On the Waterfront for free at Byrant Park when we returned. As we did not, we listened to music in our room and soon were asleep.

The gateway to the building and grounds

Tuesday we managed to spend a few hours at the Hispanic Society of America, a brief visit to the Morgan Library, and in the evening saw a fine production of a rarely-done Cole Porter, Nymph Errante in the Clurmont Theatre on Theatre Row off 10 Avenue and 42nd Street. I’ll dwell on the absurdly neglected Hispanic Society site: it’s made up of several buildings desperately in need of air-conditioning; the organization lacks the money to renovate because it lacks the audience its rich collections of great Spanish art, potential gardens should have. Within its narrow range it offers experiences likes those at the Metropolitan museum.

Sea Idyll by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923), whose work the museum has some stunning examples of, especially one vast mural around one room

We found playful work by a 16th century woman sculptor (Luisa Roldan), Goyas we’d not seen before, and unexpectedly striking interesting pictures from the later 19th to early 20th century. The pottery and arts and crafts rooms would have held us but they were stifling. We went into a small library where we saw about 20 dedicated scholars: the society owns 600,000 items from the 10th century to the present day from Spanish and Portuguese speaking cultures around the world.

We walked to a nearby building where Jim said was right now available a huge old-fashioned 8 room apartment for $400,000. We need only sell our house … (I do love my house.)

Jennifer Blood as Eve, Abe Goldfarb as Alexei

Nymph Errante is a paradoxically innocent play: the heroine never manages to lose her virginity; she journeys from finishing school with her friends to a succession of half-mad wild romantic places in the company of risque males, none of whom attempts anything more than the latest Twilight vampire. While its conventional approach to sex for women is grating and some of the dialogue hopelessly naive (a full audience became less than full after intermission), the music is so appealing, lyrics witty and amusing enough, and the tone of the characters and situations so good-natured, and actresses and actors doing their parts so well, the whole is hard to resist.

We enjoyed it, and I recommend trying to see it if it comes near you or you come near it. It was blotted out by the super-successful Anything Goes (both of them starring Gertrude Lawrence). No film has ever been made. That’s a shame since the costume changes (Eve visits that many cultures) begin of themselves to intrigue.

We did get to the two big Manhattan museums. We went to the Metropolitan Museum Wednesday morning. I saw a (to me) horrifying exhibit: Naked it was called, and it was made up of photographs of the naked women famous artists used. It exposed the ruthlessness of these artists, how they used these women sexually. Not one woman’s name appeared. These were handed about instead of hiring more poverty-striken girls. Sheer unconscious porn some of it. That Diane Arbus’s photo of two elderly middle class people naked in their living room just fit in tells you what the curators were implicitly showing you.

I refreshed my mind with staring at a Monet of a lashing sea under a ston-y arch.

A few years back now the Metropolitan Museum in NYC began a policy of
bringing up to the galleries lots of paintings hitherto consigned to the basement as inferior. Among these was Henry Lerolles’s The Organ Rehearsal.

I did notice it when it was first brought up — as who could not. It’s so big and filled with a quiet passion, and the woman dressed like the heroine of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. The conventional prejudices were against it (it’s anecdotal, about middle class doings) as well as a relatively unknown painter (another no no still), but it is winning out now. here’s a fine lecture from YouTube from an ex-ballerina French woman now involved in conserving and bringing back paintings, Isabelle Duvernois:

Walking away we went through Central Park, and wound about and about (we did a lot of walking), then on the block between Amsterdam and Columbia, West 76th Street where we used to live. I hardly recognized the brownstone we rented a flat in for a year. It did seem the same size. I had forgotten there was a synagogue on the street; now it houses an international school. We ate at the Amsterdam Ale House, not there when we lived there either.

In the evening we went down to 16th Street, to a new complex of small theaters (Potomac Theater Project) to see Caryl Churchill’s prophetic 1980s Serious Money. I could not understand all the details of the money-transactions going on (as I cannot today derivatives and the like), but I certainly got the central point: these amoral thieves and gamblers with everyone’s money are preying on the rest of us, destroying us, while they one-up, needle, and use one another.

A Spanish type Mrs Thatcher keeping up with the lying Mitt Romney (American) wheeler-dealer type

It includes suicide, and inspired wackiness (see review) in the service of showing how little these wealthy people care to help those they impoverish (that’s why in the play they pretend not to know what to do).

The Modern on later Thursday morning to mid-afternoon. A long-twisting and turning line to get in. It had left over from its Cindy Sherman triumph the book of the exhibit and several others; I just bought the cheapest, in paperback, the book of the exhibit. It’s filled with riches, especially the earlier series of untitled black-and-white stills where she is at her finest — her exposing, imitating, parodying whatever word you want to chose how women presented themselves in life and the media 1950s to 60s.

Someone studying one of the Living Man Declared Dead and other Chapters exhibit

Less famous apparently but stunning, maybe more is was a long exhibit of part of a huge book of photographs by Taryn Simon. The museum’s carefully neutral description does not convey the horror and terror of individual lives (some of whom were responsible for this horror and terror) that she got at by tracing the genealogy of the relatives afterward, photographing them and gathering and photographing the detritus of their lives. It was not necessary to find victims of pogroms to do this, though some of the chapters are about descendents of Nazis and the Nazi lives and doings; others are about the winners whose winning ought to appall; ways of desperate lives in Africa. One particularly got me: an Indian region where relatives of one branch of a family will often bribe officials in a court to declare the legitimate heirs to some property dead and take over that property. We see what happens to the disinherited.

Take the time to listen to the brief YouTube on the side. Usually I stay away from anything having to do with genealogy since usually the people want to find famous numinous pasts. It’s silly; you can prove anything about your genealogy too. But I had not taken into account an intelligent use of researching different family patterns in different cultures. Simon herself gets on and discusses what she does. Many are women who can’t be photographed — not allowed by men, or frightened by what others will use of this. And so sad – these rabbits deliberately killed in Australia, how given disease and all their pictures. Tons of money to kill. Trying to stop people gathering chocolate rabbits. Representing a massacre in the 1990s. A woman who hijacked planes. We are all forms of the dead, living ghosts of the past shaping us today.

We even got down to the Strand for an hour or so. it has not gone down! They have just as many and maybe more books than ever. In fact, they’ve improved: nor more turnstiles with lots of suspicious searches of customers. You just walk in . Downstairs has not changed much: still not air-conditioned, but the reviewer books section is now alphabetized:

Our house is like a library too

The books I treated myself to: Adeline Tinter’s Edith Wharton in Context, Kate Summerscale’s Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. I found a whole row Winston Graham Poldark novels under “G” in the fiction section. Very high up. I had to climb a ladder and then made a young male clerk worried about me as I came down; he came over to stretch out a hand as I tottered up there. These were a 1960s set of books, Poldarks 1-7, a Bodley head Oxford edition whose suggestive illustrations reminded me of an edition of Susan Hill’s Women in Black or the Oxford set of Palliser books.

Demelza on the back end paper

I can’t afford to buy books just like this but as I have just one Jeremy Poldark (in the series the third novel) I bought a second. The set didn’t go beyond novel 7, confirming my sense that novels 8-12 have never been read as much. The best of these latter is Twisted Sword, novel 11 of which I have only a book-of-the-month club version.

For last Christmas Izzy and I got Jim a book of lyrics with attendant comments put together by Stephen Sondheim and a team, Finishing the Hat;; well he bought himself the second volume, Look, I Made a Hat.

Then it was time — just in time — to hurry ourselves to Grand Central, and get on the train to go home again home again, jiggedy-jig. We made very good time, arriving at Washington DC by 7:30; we took the Metro from there and we were Izzy by 8:05 and sitting down to Chinese food with her before 8:30 pm.

We had had some ill luck. Just when we were there Shakespeare in the Park was dark; we found we had just missed out on this lecture or were not in the right week for that show. My spirits were more consistently cheerful than I usually am, I was up to it. What we did not get to do this time we’ll do in October.

Ellen

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Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter: fathers & daughters & busdrivers & death

Parents waving goodbye to their son for the last time (1997 The Sweet Hereafter)

Dear friends and readers,

Fifteen years ago Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter was strongly praised, analyzed galore, its showing in local cinemas accompanied by long lines of people waiting outside to get in. Supported by the novelist, Russell Banks, and another script writer, Egoyan defied studio control and censorship, and made a movie dramatizing primal fears, anxieties, illusions in family life in the context of hardship and sudden inexplicable death. Here is a much belated recommendation.

In a nutshell, this film just captures the hardness of our choices, of life’s very stream of painful consciousness. The brilliance of the Pied Piper analogy is the temptation of oblivion. As Roger Ebert says the film is about the grief of survivors, those who’ve done what they had to do and remained somewhat true to their emotional life and needs, a lament for the human condition.
It is a gripping film.

How so? Well, from the very opening you sit there clutched by a sense of defused dread as, knowing what is to come, you watch a group or sets of parents put their children onto a school bus, where they are welcomed up by a kind woman bus-driver (our pied piper figure). The children wave goodbye, the bus drives off, and all but one set of parents never see the children alive again, and the daughter who survives, Nicole Burden (Sarah Polley) seems to be severely crippled. She is in a wheelchair, has to be carried around for life.

Not until mid-way in the film do we get actually to witness the terrible slide of the bus on the ice, its falling across a landscape, and then sinking lower and lower down a cliff into freezing ice, but we are told what’s in store first thing because the film begins with the lawyer, Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) attempting to convince one set of angry grieving parents they must hire him to sue the bus company or whoever is responsible for the bus malfunctioning over this mass death to preclude it happening again.

The bus beginning its slide

The chronological straight-forward story-telling line of the movie is made up of Mitchell’s visits to each set of parents to persuade them to sue, his investigation of the bus (camera in hand), and finally him watching over the deposition of Nicole and others in front of a magistrate, preparatory to a trial.

This storyline is interspersed with slowly accumulating flashbacks: 1) of children coming out to take the bus, mostly with one or both parents, these leading to the crash; 2) of the parents’ unknown private lives, e.g. Risa Walker (Alberta Watson) escaping to playful sex trysts with Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood); 3) of Mitchell’s life, his coming on a plane and confiding to a young woman his wretched relationship with his daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks), itself visualized in interspersed dramatic scenes of him receiving angry cell phones calls from this disturbed daughter who hates him, jeers at him, is ever prostituting herself, drinking, taking drugs, ever lying and demanding money.

Threaded in also are scenes from the present of the parents’ lives apart from their children: each interview by Mitchell captures a trauma apart from the loss of the child: Risa (Alberta Watson) is married to a brute of a man, Wendell (Maury Chaykin) and their son is disabled; Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood) is a widower with twins who follows the bus with his car and is thus the sole parent witness to the crash; Delores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), the bus-driver is married to a helpless paraplegic. And we witness scenes of parenting, sometimes bad: Sam Burden (Tom McCamus) appears to be using Nicholle sexually and anticipating taking her earnings as a rock-singer. Sometimes good: terrified self-sacrificing (before sickness) behavior of Mitchell when Nicolle was 2.

Ian Holm as Mitchell Stevens on the plane

This is another film and book I chose to read and to see as a result of the publication of my essay on the film adaptations of Anthony Trollope in Bloom and Pollock’s Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation. (See Patrice Chereau & Anne-Louise Trividic’s Gabrielle.) Mary Sanders Pollock has a perceptive essay on the film as mediated to us and shaped by the presence in it of Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin: “The Power of Money: Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. Banks’s film about American today in the midwest and Egoyan’s transformation of it into a Canadian landscape make it into this volume because in flashbacks we watch and hear Nicole read aloud Browning’s poem to two of the children who were killed while she is baby-sitting with them before the crash. In Banks’s book the girl reads aloud Babar the Elephant, an apparently innocent story (but see my Disney’s Dumbo & Brunhoff’s Babar) whose hard sting is the deah of the elephant’s mother. Polloy makes considerable play with Browning’s particular take on the folk tale (which she’s published an article about elsewhere), emphasizing the poem’s ironies and a critique of the parents for seeing in their children commodities.

There were numerous reviews and at least 3 serious film studies of this adaptation around the time it came out; all at least noticed Browning’s “Pied Piper” is read aloud (you can’t miss it) and suggested, like Pollock does, the archetypal folk tale provides a parallel mythic story of children stolen away by an archetypal figure of death (the Pied Piper can be so likened), of greed (as the Hamelin townsmen will not pay the Piper for ridding the town of rats and he gets back by removing the children forever from them so these so these Canadian parents are seduced by a desire for money from a court suit), and desolation.

Money is a central concern of Banks’s book, which is based on an actual historical crash and ensuing series of suits. Banks interweaves the intense desire for riches, for payment, for living a luxurious life so rare now in the desperate conditions of much American working and lower middle class life. In the actual case the suit could not go forward because one girl claimed that the bus driver was speeding and Banks turns this girl into a fictional character who gets back at her father who has inflicted incestuous sex on her, has wanted to exploit her to make money and know glamor. Banks shows there is no such thing as community in US life when it comes to money; it’s a war of all on all.

Mitchell Stevens’s baby daughter who gives him such trouble as a baby and when grown

Nicole who lies and ruins the court case

I suggest though that Egoyan’s film’s thrust is quite different. A couple of studies have pointed out how many differences there are between the film and book. Egoyan is deeply sympathetic to these parents: they are not shown greedy for money at all. They are all deeply grieving, and they are poor, eeking out livings in motels, as subsidence artists, driving buses, manning gas stations. We see them devotedly taking their children to the bus. In fact the point is made these parents’ lives are dominated by the children’s needs. What pleasure they know is stolen in fleeting moments. Sam’s infliction of incest on his daughter is kept to one brief enigmatic surreal dream scene and what’s emphasized is how lovingly he takes her to her gigs, how guilty and concerned he feels over her crippled state. We watch him slowly carry her from place to place. The look on her face is continually hard, enigmatic, mean. She looks ungrateful, sly, sneaky and as she tells this story to the younger children getting kick perhaps out of puzzling, perhaps half-frightening them. She seems to want (understandably though) some kind of revenge.

Parenthood is traumatic in the film, especially fatherhood. This film’s core experience is Mitchell Stevens’s harassment and misery because of his daughter’s behavior to him. A parallel is set up between Nicole Burden who lied and Zoe. IN the film there is a sense the parents will not only benefit monetarily; but emotionally. A suit will provide closure and if untrue make them think the accident was not an accident, could have been avoided. They can somehow “get back” and two of the mothers want that.

Mitchell himself is a driven man who cannot understand what went wrong in his parenting. His wife breast-fed the child way past age 2; they gave her all, and the wife is now dead. The girl is a half-crazed drug-addict. He seems to want to get back at someone and says someone is always at fault and therefore it must be the bus company which didn’t take proper care of their bus; if not them, he’ll find out who is to blame. Not the bus-driver he says, and indeed it seems the children were the fantasy family of this woman who is otherwise childless and it is made clear she was not speeding but drove as carefully and cheerfully on this day as she had on any other. But snow (a weather element that can signal death in gothic) is everywhere and patches of ice abound. The landscape is filled with cliffs and turning roads and mountains as in illustrations to many Pied Piper stories, for the Pied Piper takes the children into a mountain from which they never return.

The film’s meaning is conveyed through these juxtapositions of stories and visual pictures, through the close-ups of people’s faces where through the social guise of clothes we see the inner vulnerable spontaneous self. I did like how so much of these couples seemed to be in a kind of retreat. If going it on your own is the way of today’s America, most people are at least in pairs and making their nests as comfortable as they can.

Underlying the film (perhaps this is not conscious on Egoyan’s part) is the mythic book and film, The Bad Seed. Nicole is the ironic modern version of the crippled child of the original Pied Piper story who escapes because he can’t walk as fast. The obverse of the American worship of family life, motherhood, making children the end of one’s existence is the story of the murderous child who sows discord, destroys parents, houses. Only here the children are as burdened as their parents, by these parents’ needs (we see Risa unable to cope with her disabled son) and lack of resources or knowledge of what to do beyond send them to school and hope for a good outcome. We have weeping mothers and fathers who wring their hands or (as in Billy Ansell) go into a rage because they don’t want to have to face whatever feelings they have, but just move on somehow. This is the case with Risa’s husband who does not want to go forward with the suit either.

Bruce Greenwood as Billy Ansell has happy moments too: here he is welcoming Risa into their shared roo for the evening; he enjoys driving behind the bus waving at his twins and honking his horn

But they are not alone. The film seems to be showing us how we don’t know how to cope with life either, or the system we find ourselves in. What kind of solution or resolution of grief is to be found in our court system, an adversarial one set up as a race for money or verdicts of guilty.

So I don’t agree either with a popularly-written attack (Film Fix by Lee) on this film as one which toys on how hard it is to cope with death. It’s true so many films nowadays mirror the miseries and hardships and troubles of American life. They are bringing out into the discussable open the hidden traumas of our lives, for some they are cathartic, for some they validate someone’s experience he or she does not feel as alone. They are meant to mirror the hardships of life on the American continent from wintry Canada to the west to big cities and towns.

The sweet hereafter as a phrase is ironic. These people will know peace when they too follow a pied piper into death – across a mountain. The bus rides through mountains of snow. When last seen Delores Driscoll has become a jolly and gay bus driver again; this time she’s driving people to an airport. Oh dear oh dear.

Ellen

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Splendeurs et misères: George Bellows at the National Gallery

George Bellows (1882-1925), Paddy Flannigan (1909) — the insolence with which he guards himself is not going to help him much in life

Bellows, Madeline Davis, the post-master’s orphaned grand-daughter (1914) — the pathos and loneliness of her expressive face has a wounded feel

Moonlight Skating — Central park, the Terrace and the Lake, 1878 (by John O’Brien Inman) — the kind of picture Bellows sought to replace

Dear Friends and readers,

Another must-see! Splendeurs et misères (as in Balzac’s novel). This one is just chock-a-block with these magnificent brilliant stunning pictures, intelligently set up so you can journey through a career and age:

Knowing that I cannot do justice to the initial impact, social vision, painterly splendor, and wide range of the pictures (they seem to come from so many museums, private collections, and books) by George Bellows at the National Gallery, I thought I might suggest why people should be sure and go to this exhibit either in DC, or New York (it’s coming to the Met next) or London (the Royal Academy) by at least displaying unusual images reprinted in the generous catalogue book edited by Charles Brock, but I find that lots of people have beat me to it. The Net has a slew of images of Bellows work readily available, and armed with a few titles and a little effort the viewer can find many lesser known lithographs:

Bellows. A lynching (the caption says the law takes too long it’s meant ironically);

illustrations:

Bellows, Hungry Dogs;

(a favorite subject for Bellows), Hudson River landscapes:

Bellows, Rain on the River (1908);

paintings of widespread banal poverty and mutually-inflicted human misery:

Bellows, Cliff Dwellers (1914) — as a child I watched my mother string out wet clothes across a street in the Bronx (circa 1950);

hugely crowded (not a space, not a place of rest in the canvas) and exhilarating or nearly people-less and desolate nightmare city- and industrial landscape:

Bellows, Building Grand Central (a series);

and of course savagely violent boxing:

Bellows, Both Members of the Club (the way elites watched illegal boxing was to allow the instruments of their appetite to become members for a night).

The Net even has caches of Bellows’s lesser known exquisite John Singer Sergeant (or Cecilia Beaux) type portraiture:

George Bellows, Geraldine Lee (1914) — I just love the tone of that pink outfit, and don’t miss the dark pink hat

So what could I say that would suggest maybe there is something there you’ve not seen before? or remind you of what there is to see in huge and vivid size? or suggest what this particular exhibit might offer them?

Well, first, I lead with two portraits I found especially arresting, and a third picture card landscape (Inman’s populist Central Park). Then show by choices from the wide selection on the Net and my new book that while partly denying this (nervously), the exhibit nonetheless cannot help but insistently demonstrate the moving socialist and pro-people point of view that Bellows spent much of his art making electrifyingly visible.

I hope this choice suggests something of the variety and themes Bellows favored for most of his career. He worked for a magazine called The Masses, and was close with John Reed (Ten Days that Shook the World) whose name pops up repeatedly in the little explanations on the walls of the exhibit. The electrocution is one of these:

Bellows, The Electrocution.

A note of critical evaluation: Wonderfully attractive & sharply incisive, some with satirical commentary (as in his huge pictures of Billy Sunday with huge crowds labelled by his as evil for art, spiritual life and decency) as most of the paintings and drawings are, they did fall off after or around the time of World War I. The exhibit reveals how quickly Bellows was tremendously successful despite his apparent iconoclasm and radicalism. If he did make visible what the elite and powerful did not like to look at in real life, they didn’t mind when it came to his art. And as he grew successful, he seems to have stepped away from painting scenes of modern half-crazy slightly nightmare-like city life and landscape, from exposures of human cruelty.

In the exhibit World War I was a kind of turning point for Bellows’s art. While his WW1 pictures were certainly shocking and determined to show the viewer Writ Large the hideous violence and indifference to human suffering that war causes (hands cut off, a woman with her breast cut off by a man who sits next to her smoking a cigarette) and how people have no problem inflicting inhumane gov’t policies:

Bellows, Return of the Useless [from POW and slave labor camps] (1918),

they are also overt propaganda which falsifies, makes theatrical and turns war into crass displays of sentiment. As Bellows grew richer, went to live in Grammercy Park, took his holidays in Maine,and built a home in Woodstock, he began to idealize and make enigmatic landscapes, which if lovely felt child-like or cartoon-y.

One example: until this turning point, I was so aware of the hard life of horses in Bellows pictures. Big dray ones, tired, men standing nearby with whips; they were ubiquitous, used carelessly and ignored (in the picture at any rate). Then suddenly there was this vision of a horse at last without a harness, making its way towards a heavenly sky:

Bellows, The White Horse (1922)

Now the dog is happy, tail wagging, getting plenty to eat.

His later work is made up of more landscapes (now undistinguished from postcard type), pictures of himself, Emma, his wife, and daughter as, fore example, an exemplary fisherman and family, of the daughter dressed like an upper class lady of long ago, jumping rope in the privacy of Grammercy Park. These show the same splendors of paint and strong theatricality of all the paintings, maybe show it up.

Maybe one of the reasons Bellows did so well was finally his paintings do not disquiet, even the most savage of them. They celebrate being alive; nature is a dynamic glorious force and if many people have to live anonymous hard lives, they are not doing it alone and they do it vigorously.

Throughout the exhibit one read of how “masculine” was his vision and it is true that except as John Singer Sergeant type ladies or young working girls painted with unusual compassion and dignity in the same mode, the pictures are crowded with men, show male activities, present young working boys (rather than girls) bathing in the city rivers. Women appear: scolding children, as prostitutes, as fancy paid mistresses of fat cat males with top hats, but they are more in the mode of side affairs, decorations, there like the horses with male as the main dominating sufferers and power. When his style changed, and grew more stylized, flatter, I liked his pictures less. I found too that I sometimes got more out of his drawings, the lines bringing out clearly what he was showing than the colouristic treatment of the paintings.

Perhaps had Bellows lived into the depression, he would have found a new angle and returned to his original subject matter and perspective, moved into another new style. He did die young: aged 42, of peritonitis after his appendix burst. Cut off but not forgotten.

I do not mean to detract from the value of the paintings at all, but rather suggest that a viewer sees enough to begin to think for herself beyond the incessant praise of the explanations. The exhibit was accompanied by tables in the center of the rooms with hand-written notes by Bellows or his wife of prices, exhibits, their plans of what to do next. You felt them as people, two lives and a career unfolding before you.

As I particularly love meditative landscapes, I was entranced by the vivid variety and intense colors of these, the appropriate objects and things in them, like a particular kind of tree, a lone house, sparkles in just the right corner of something. Winter and (the real effects of) snow were favorite themes for Bellows — and so too for me. And I spent many years of my life walking up and down drives along the Hudson river so was drawn in repeatedly:

Bellows, Winter Afternoon (1908)

Bellows, Easter Snow (something we may not see any more) — I do like that boy and girl (I have a photo of me aged 2, in spring, standing on a mountain of snow)

It seems that Bellows’s wife, Emma (who was a fellow art student) managed to live quite well after her husband died. She had been a central person in his life; one sees that immediately after his death, a wide exhibit was set up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that she carried on selling his pictures for higher and higher prices. His loving picture of her which suggests a fulfilled domestic life is one of the lead pictures for the exhibit:

Bellows, Emma at the Piano (1914)

The National Gallery has quite a summer schedule of exhibits. There’s a fine small display of photography called “I Spy” (“the theater of the street”); pictures by the Renaissance writer, Castiglione; and coming in another couple of weeks
another blockbuster show, this one featuring alluring pictures which remind me of E. M. Forster scenes

Jim and I are lucky to live within a hop, skip and jump of Washington D. C.
We get to the National Gallery by driving at around 2 pm to a street about 5 minutes away from our house which allows three-hour parking. The three hours is over at 5 pm. So we are safe from a ticket. The Metro train is a block away, the trip about 20 to 30 minutes depending on vagaries of fixing, time, crowds. Then we walk a block in the Penn Quarter which is just the sort of place that Bellows would have painted.

Ellen

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John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore: On Doing a Sexually Radical Play in the Shenandoah Valley

John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Patrick Earl as Giovanni, the lover-brother, and Denice Mahler as his sister-lover, Annabella), from the ASC’s production 2012

Dear friends and readers,

This is a “must-see” production. So wrote the “Mid-Atlantic Travel Blogger” who while anonymous had enough clout to see a “private” performance of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore by the group who used to call themselves “The Shenandoah Shakespeare”. He or she couldn’t or doesn’t explain why; indeed seemed puzzled how such a “twisted” play could please, and put it down to “shock.”

Within a few seconds of the start of the second act, I realized this was the production Ford’s daring play calls for: its note throughout is a gleeful exposure of the angry cynicism, amorality or sheer stupidity (imbecility) of all the authority figures of the play: some are amoral such as the cardinal (Rick Blunt), who is disinclined to prosecute the murder of one citizen because the murderer has some connections, and who gathers up all the gold left by dead strewn across the stage at the play’s close; some are justifiably cynical like Hippolita (Stephanie Holladay Earl), rejected wife of a nobleman; or Vasques (Eugene Douglas) a kind of Iago who pronounces moral lessons. There are simpletons who enforce unexamined norms: Florio (Daniel Abraham Stevens), Annabella’s father who forces her to marry the vicious treacherous Soranzo (Jake Mahler). There are the complicit for their own appetites and interest’s sake, Putana, Annabella’s “nurse” (Bridget Rue as brothel madam); Grimaldi, willing to murder at the drop of a sword (typical type of this era, played by Michael Amendola). Dark farce is the way much of these interactions are performed, with over-the-top garishly sexual costuming for the women. The story is complicated but it’s told simply at wikipedia).

Really though there’s nothing new here for us in 2012. Old hat since Marat/Sade. What is startling and commendable is from the second part of the play on, the players did Giovanni and Annabella’s love for one another as totally passionate, a beautiful thing, two souls made for one another with the most idealistic soaring of the spirit. Here’s Annabella telling Soranza what Giovanni is:

This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human, as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You! why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him. (Act 3, sc 3)

The look of aspiration in Earl’s eyes is pitch perfect:

The twisting of this young man from within until he goes mad by the end of the act and himself cruelly murders Annabella (Othello-like, and Ford alludes to Othello, he cannot bear to have his woman taken by Soranzo nightly) and stalks about covered with the blood of Soranzo crazed and vehemently assailing the world from the top of his lungs on the top of a high table — these final moments are where the plot-design of the whole play had been heading.

As ever, our players “did it with the lights on,” and so they had no technology to rivet or distract us with. Earl as Giovanni was up to absorbing an audience into awed silence watching him. At the play’s close he has not the problem of what to do next since Vasques comes up to stab him from behind and then has his hired assassins (several in black who turn up whenever needed) to finish the job off:

The woman imitates a police offer, the men without the religious symbols FBI and spy-detective types, and then there’s a priest

The second half of this production was thus much braver than the Capital Fringe Festival group two summers ago who drew out of an abridged version of the play a socially acceptable feminist moral: at one point Annabella tells us (in this production from a high window) we are seeing “A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy (Act 5, sc 1). But the dignity with which she is endowed, and the way the previous production managed to suggest this play was about men oppressing women was not followed here. This Annabella grovels on the floor:

The lines emphasized are those which present the two people as gripped by love, unable to do without one another surrounded by these “vile” types. The production used “mash-up” techniques for the intermission and during the play we were treated to 1950s rock-n-roll ballads that were very familiar to me, strains of them which I could not quite place: about love a blind passion, about loneliness. Soranzo’s bullying becomes a raping of Annabella nightly instead of justifiable rage at finding himself stuck with a pregnant woman who will not tell her lover’s name; he orders her to bed (the lines are there) where he will again do what he wants. Coerced marriage is rape.

The play put me in mind of Simon Raven’s unfortunately little known masterpiece novel, Fielding Gray: the life of the homosexual male is twisted and perverted by having to hide it, being subject to blackmail and abuse. Heterosexuals can be as nasty and horrible as they please in their sex life, it remains okay as it’s heterosexual; homosexual sex is not prima facie no good in itself; it’s what the society does to it that makes it base and wild (see my blog on Andrew Davies’s film adaptation of Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty). So too incest here. Ford’s play differs from the many Jacobean plays enacting incest or incestuous desires and vicarious sex (Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s Women Beware Women): Ford empathizes with the lovers. As Eric Minton puts it, Giovanni and Annabella are just these “true-hearted individuals who just happen to have fallen in love with someone sprung from the same womb. Theirs may be the squirmiest sin, but many other characters prove more loathsome in their violent natures, their greed, their infatuation with revenge, and their self-serving self-righteous.” Minton then goes over the downright silly in the play but omits one young woman, Philotis (Bridget Rue), who is sent to a nunnery in a sort of daze: she had on a shiny satiny skirt with a petticoat which reminded me of outfits made for little girls who are given tap-dancing lessons by middle class US parents for the once-a-year stage performance.

Alas though, reading the Mid-Atlantic Traveler, and finding hardly any reviews of this play, and remembering how the previous production I have seen (so to speak) normalizes the action in terms of 20th century values, perhaps the players and their director were rightly cautious in the introduction and first half. They had an added on introduction which both trivialized the coming play and warned us against it, going so far as to tell us Giovanni was a bad villain. It was all a joke we were going to see, but if we couldn’t take some (whisper the word) “incest,” perhaps we shouldn’t stay. Then the first act had the actors at first turning to the audience as if to ask for boos. What they discovered was there were several fools in the first row who took this seriously and began to call out heckling comments which was then half-clapped by further idiots further back. The play-acting in this first act was oddly artificial and over-the-top strident, rather like a clown show. The way of playing the love of Giovanni and Annabella and the betrayals of the other characters seemed to suggest it was a mystery what could possibly have fuelled Ford to write such a ridiculous piece. Maybe the heckling did some good, for I could see the actors begin to stop appealing to the audience, back off, speed up, though not until the second act did the front row people begin to realize they were not supposed to boo Giovanni or call him out as a “bad guy.” Perhaps the gouging out of Putana’s eyes after Vasques manipulates and deludes her into revealing that Annabella’s lover is Giovanni did the trick to silence them. I admit they interfered with my enjoyment in the first act and was relieved when they fell silent.

During the intermission for the first time in all the many times I have seen ASC productions (a lot of them by now), I began to think well, at long last they have goofed. Or maybe it was that in such a conservative era, and in this mid-Virginia Shenandoah valley (not so far off is Evangelical Jerry Falwell country) they were scared off of doing justice to the very material they had chosen. I might have suggested to Jim we go home, only it had been a 3 hour drive to get there. But I remembered the choice of ’50s music during the intermission and hoped it was deliberate and stayed.

In the event, the actors switched gears totally and the last hour and a half was magnificent in energy, bravura, acting, poignancy.

From a Brooklyn Academy of Music production

It may be that the day we went there just happened to be a number of naive audience members in the first row. I have seen actors on stage make the mistake of inviting an audience slightly to cut up, and have to actually not just back up but even half-scold said audience to get them to be courteous in their interactions again. One must not forget that the actors on a stage are in a state of abjection to the audience: they may seem to be individually triumphing, releasing themselves, showing off, but they are performing for us, nailed down to their scripts, often showing themselves, costumed in dangerously vulnerable ways. Actors have sometimes had overtly to separate themselves from evil characters to protect themselves from the audience’s identification of them with their roles. I have read insightful accounts of theater which make this point about the reality of the actor’s rightly unacknowleged position of supplication (See Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects: 18th Century Players and Ideology on the long-hard slog actors of the 18th century performed to gain respect stop heckling and abuse, and protect the actresses.) I had not actually experienced what this means before this.

Jim had a different take — while just as surely recommending going to see it if you are at all within driving distance. Over dinner Jim argued that Ford is playing with ideas, at a distance from them (in the way I think of the Fletcher plays, Middleton and Massinger in his comedies). The play, Jim says, is misogynistic. Ford judges Annabella to be a whore, using the term in a general vilifying way to mean any woman who has sex outside marriage even if with just one man. (Izzy protested that Annabella cannot be a whole because she is paid nothing, has no money; she used the 20th century definition of whore means prostitute which is the way I use the term.) Jim maintains the text of the play blames Annabella. Her looseness starts the evil spreading. PUtano had it coming to her. Vasques is the Vindice (revenger on behalf of God and providence) character and that’s why he is left standing. Jim suggested that since a modern audience would dislike this very much, and want to empathize with a tragic character and feel for the victims, the people who do Ford must alter the play into black farce. Then we don’t worry who is to blame. Or they can, like the Capital Fringe people, impose a modern anti-misogynistic message by abridging.

Tragic heroine from The Broken Heart

I’m not sure. I find it hard not to read Ford’s The Broken Heart as feminist. If we are to blame Annabella, why not Giovanni who is cursed by several authority figures in the play. Surely Soranzo. Vasques recalls Shakespeare’s Iago.

So don’t miss the play. This is a play where the behavior spectacle of the audience may become part of the play and the play itself of real interest.

Ellen

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