Dear friends and readers,

Last night Jim and I went to the Folger Shakespeare theater to see an adaptation of Susannah Centlivre’s The Basset Table. I want to recommend seeing it, urge readers who live in the DC area or not far away to come and enjoy. They (everyone involved it seemed) gave it their all, and it’s a rare treat you won’t see again soon.

It’s not a great production which somehow conveys some deep inner life and feel of the play (the way the fairly recent Folger Clandestine Marriage by Colman and Garrick and years’ ago Dryden’s Marriage a La Mode as altered by Giles Havergal( were; but The Gaming Table is entertaining, pleasurable, funny and the updating does not change the play much at all, merely prunes and makes it more understandable to a modern audience.

I was sufficiently aroused to come home and read the play for the first time in my life — till after midnight. I had read Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret previously and John Wilson Bowyer’s well-written, informative, insightful book, The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre (as you see recommended), but never went on to read any thing more as in these two plays (whatever Bowyer said and however unconventional her life until she married the king’s cook), Centlivre’s texts seemed to me so conventional, the language without inner poetry and the themes mildly cared about (lukewarm), but this rendition made me read anew. I now felt Centlivre’s proto-feminism, ardent witty defense of strong women and pleasure (including at the gaming table), the real theatrical possibilities of her scripts. The flaw in the play’s thematic stances (muted in this production) is its condescending snobbery to Mr and Mrs Sago, citizen and wife. The production did all it could to give it a forward thrust since Centlivre’s text also lacks the kind of clinching incident which makes a play a suspenseful experience whose ending we look anxiously or amusingly towards: they had for all the characters very colorful dazzling even costumes, using cliches to the limit, all the laughs were played up broadly, the acting was good and delivery of lines sharp and apt. Especially strong is Tonya Beckman Ross as Mrs Sago; she deliverered the new prologue and epilogue and starred in the Folger’s previous production of Marivaux’s Game of Love and Chance:

For a moment one felt a little of the fun between audience and actress that the prologue and epilogue tradition of the 18th century encourages. The verse was clearly a modern imitation of 18th century verse and referred to our theater, experience, lives and hers as actress-Mrs Sago too

The stage was a series of stairways up and down, criss-cross, with an upside light on one wall (that was never explained). There are so few stills from the production online that I can offer only this photo from a rehearsal:

But you can see the whole theater set up for this play here on the recent banner of their promotional ads for the Folger:

The loss here was a sort of Chekhovian lingering on the feel of the milieu in the text itself, an invite simply to feel awash in the diurnal sweetness of life (I allude to Tallyrand) which since I last saw it captured for an 18th century text in the 1983 BBC Mansfield Park film, the director (Eleanor Holdridgeg) and adaptor (David Grimm) are not to be blamed for. It seems the way modern productions usually feel the way to make audiences like 18th century plays is to as gaudy, antic, and (when they understand it) coolly ironic as possible. the refusal to try for depth of feeling (I admit) made me nod off during one lull where I could see how Centlivre was moving counters round on a stage, but it was not for long). Well the plays are that but they can be more.

However, not to cavil as probably the people putting on these productions knew their audience and the house was full and seemed very pleased by the end. Some of the funniest scenes were of the young ardent scientist woman, Valerie (Emily Trask) and her sweet lover who also wants to marry her for her money, Ensign Lovely (Robbie Ray), a kind Tom Jones avant la lettre character. Centlivre got in some early hits against cruelty to animals:

Lady Reveller: Oh, barbarous! killed your pretty Dove. [Starting]
Valeria: Killed it! Why, what did you imagine I bred it up for? Can Animals, Insects, or Reptiles be put to a nobler Use than to improve our Knowledge?

and perhaps was an early devotee of the English navy (she appears in this production to make fun of her dislike of the French). Michael Milligan did Sir James Courtly as a gay male and I think had in mind a performance by a brilliant English actor I saw a long time ago as Oscar Wilde (himself) in a Wilde play; he was all suavity and salacious self-control (he seemed hardly to move but with steathly nuance) and innuendo: his wig was huge and his costume glittered. Perhaps because I over-idealize or romanticize what Anne Oldfield must’ve been I was disappointed in Julie Jesneck as Lady Reveller; she didn’t revel enough, but was more intent to reject the lovelorn (abject in this production) Lord Worthy (Marcus Kyd). Ashley Ivey as Buckle, Worthy’s servant, stole some scenes and we feel for him very much (and are meant to) when Worthy slaps him hard (I hope not as hard as it sounded). Michael Glenn as the good-natured Captain Hearty and Micheal Willis as the stern tyrant father to Valeria did their easy bits.

Still I came away remembering Tonya Beckman Ross as Mrs Sago, and it is she backwards that the Folger has chosen to use as their gravatar:

There is an accompanying exhibit only a tiny part of which we got to see: of women writers and women in the theater. It had not yet opened! There was only the room with paraphernalia about Centlivre: real cards from the era, a frontispiece which showed this production imitated some of the details of the costumes, a life of Centlivre. Over at the National Museum of Women in the Arts a lecture on Centlivre is scheduled as well as a new show called “Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles and Other French National Collections.” (Centlivre’s plays are much influenced by early 18th century French plays, showing her dislike of French was not complete.) We mean to go. Probably the choice of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew is meant to fit in, but I would much have preferred and it would be even more fitting to re-do (as I once saw the RSC do at the Kennedy), Fletcher’s rousing Tamer Tamed

Perhaps Marguerite Gerard’s Angora Cat is something in the spirit of passages in Centlivre’ concoction.

See my Margaret Woffington and Francis Abingdon: hard-working girls in a material world.

Dear friends and readers,

From the Baroque period we have had opera seria and opera buffa. Now we have opera mash-up. The Met is attempting to dignify their daring creation with a pedigree by using the word “pasticcio.” Not only in opera, but on the legitimate and not-so-legitimate stage long 18th century stage (1660-1815), adaptations, free-wheeling and close, re-combinations of old plays abridged with non-dramatic genres like pastorals, clever mocking farces, and parodies were part of the on-going repertoire. And The Enchanted Island consists of a number of da capo exit arias: as my husband, Jim (knowledgeable in the area of opera) told me:

Opera seria is this rigid opera genre which consists mostly of da capo exit arias; that is, the aria ends as it began and then the character leaves the stage. There is some variation, not much. So in Rodelinda, we had that marvelous duet (Renee Fleming and Andreas Scholler as Rodelinda and Bertarido), but there is just the one. All else da capa. Enchanted Island had a number of da capo exit arias, but they mixed in a whole bunch of stuff that was not from opera and from musical compositions there was music from oratorios, contatae, even a coronation anthem (Neptune’s song was Zadoc a coronation anthem by Handel, written for George II and used ever since). So we do not get this sense of rigidity …

And the Met has a website which tells you where the original music from many of the parts come from so you can (if you wish) discover the original context and see how it’s been transposed.

Ariel is also Puck directing traffic among the confused lovers in the wood

However, as Jim suggests this is just one aspect of this entertainment. The Met has people in it who want to do the Baroque repertoire and they were permitted to do it if all was done that could be done to defy the basics of its strict music forms.

So, the story or plot-design was lifted from two different plays by Shakespeare, not so much as originally conceived by him, but as seen through Restoration and 18th century adaptations: this was a Tempest as seen through the salacious and titillating perspective of Dryden and Davenant and his Midsummer Night’s Dream), into which was imported the four lovers and their forest scenes from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jeremy Sams, librettist, and Julian Crouch, director and set designer, were not content to stay with 18th century re-writes: Sycorax (sung by Joyce DiDonato) who does appear in the 18th century renditions, has become the true heroine of the story: Prospero (sung by countertenor, David Daniels) is not Shakespeare’s more or less exemplary alter ego, victim of his own goodness at the hands of an amoral cynical brother, but someone who took over Sycorax’s island and has oppressed and controlled her (somehow — don’t press this too far) ever since. She herself is a loving mother.

Sycorax listening to Caliban’s angry grief

Prospero and Sycorax are made into faintly into an Oberon v Titania pair with the right being on Sycorax’s side as the less powerful figure.

Prospero (David Daniels) and Sycorax (Joyce Didonato)

Joyce Diddonato had the last bow at the end, even though the concluding da capo aria of Act I was Prospero’s (who tells us how he has done wrong) and the epilogue was spoken by Prospero: Shakespeare’s famous good bye speech: “Now our revels are ended.”

Thus this early 21st century creation brought home how adult and frank and playful sexually was Baroque & early to mid-18thc theatre. Cross-dressing, transvestites, continual breaching gender stereotypes: Dryden and all the 18th century writers who followed him re-did Shakespeare they did “sex” him up, make things titillating and salacious that in Shakespeare’s version remain restrained (or austere, grave, serious). There was a kind of mockery of enthrallment in heterosexual stories, especially in the thankless part of Miranda (automatically falls in love with whatever young man is put in front of her, inanely idealistic), which made me wonder had I been missing this in Shakespeare’s plays (after all from his sonnets we know he was bisexual). People interested in the early modern to 18th century from any aspect would learn by seeing this.

Helena’s outfit and its part origin

There were archetypes from novels well after the later 17th century: Luca Pisaroni played Caliban was as a wrenchingly moving re-creation of Quasimodo (he has a crooked back, is disabled mentally, mocked as ugly to his considerable emotional pain), not so much from Hugo but the famous poignant Charles Laughton’s embodiment from the 1930s film. I literally cried at Sycorax’s aria over Caliban’s grief when Helena rejects him. Tears coming down my face. The Met site tells us the music sung was a plaintive song by the Virgin Mary over Christ. The lyrics and situation transpose to a modern situation where the mother would do whatever she could do spare her child, but can do nothing. The whole sequence of Caliban’s nightmare (expressed through nightmare figures dancing) was to me the high point of Enchanted Island (and people who’ve written to me said this was true for them too). I was aware he was not singing; his acting out of anguish was enough.

Costume design came from the later 17th through 18th century: Danielle de Niese at the close had a costumed modeled on Louis XIV as Apollo, somewhat modified by memories of the high plums of headdresses by aristocratic women of the later 18th century (as seen in the recent movie based on Georgiana Spenser’s life, The Duchess, and the 1999 BBC mini-series, Lennox sisters in Aristocrats).

Danielle de Niese as Ariel taking her bow (how a person can be seen as achieving her liberty in that outfit is beyond me — to me such a costume is ironic; she is encased in hierarchies)

Allusions to the US as seen in the 18th century (a Tiepolo ceiling) abounded, but also as seen today: De Niese said she thought of Tinkerbell, the Mermaids hanging from the sky each time Neptune (Placido Domingo) made an entrance, were straight from Disney.

Dialogue — the funny remarks referred to in the interviews Deborah Voigt conducted between acts — came right out of today’s pop US & UK culture. Where one of the imported young men from MND, Demetrius (Paul Appleny), didn’t want to take “no” for “no” from Miranda, Lysander (Eliot Madore), the other, said something like “he said that last time” or ‘he always says that.” Going down to the bottom of the sea, Ariel wore a scuba-diving outfit that looked like something out of Flash Gordon (or Star Wars).

Along with Sams and Julian Crouch, a central creator was Phelim McDermott, all 3 all gay Brits; they had more than little help from a man expert in Baroque, William Christie, who chose rarely done music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, Purcella and lesser known composers, Campra, Rebel. The sensibility was gay, toned down. The extravagance was camp. This was “in your face” opera. The three men said they decided not to do anything moderate. They would concede no apologies. Opera is meant to be over-the-top and that’s what they were.

The Met as a group or team also simply want to sell their work and help operas reach a wider and younger audience. The hype of the interviews, the filming of staging backstage is all part of this. They must also outside the standard repertoire: you cannot keep doing the same 40 operas over and over in movie screens around the world, and new operas are not written very often. They were after a younger audience too. The singer chosen for the six young lovers were young handsome and/or beautiful and intended to please those who would not identify with aging divas and tenors close up. Helena was especially physically lovely; Hermia singer very moving (every time Shakespeare words used the production became much better and she was given mostly Shakespeare’s words), Lysander drop-dead beautiful in the Rufus Sewell mode. I could see Izzy was very taken by hijinks of the five in the forest.

I did find the girlish Ferdinand (very high counter-tenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo) downright embarrassing: his voice was very high and he was dressed like Ronald Colman as Rupert Hentzau when we first see him in Prisoner of Zenda (Ruritania, Knighthood was in Flower stuff). He was the only one of the six lovers altogether to wear an 18th century white wig; all the others had their own “natural” well, cascading and rich hair. Why he was so stigmatized, set apart I could not tell. (In film adaptations of older works, the older men and characters meant to be disliked regularly have wigs or heavy make-up; all the males meant to be entrancing wear their own hair. Ditto for the actresses.) The young woman doing Miranda was daffy. Maybe that had something to do with it, but as I say it’s foolish to try to find reasons for much that one saw literally. Often the makers were simply adding on whatever they could think of to amuse or dazzle.

One of several storms from the first act

I confess that by the end of Act 1 I was ambivalent: I felt I had not been moved; I recognized the Baroque proscenium stage, that the front of the stage was lined with shells (18th century stage used such forms to keep the candles in), but all the artifice, including the cardboard like ship going down in a computerized tempest just reminded me of how unreal what I was watching was. Ariel’s “duhs” and funny mock magic were amusing, but I didn’t like what I took to be making fun of Caliban in act 1; I am often turned off by over-luxurious, over-produced operas and prefer people sitting on chairs singing their hearts out so I can see how the music pieces relate to one another and really engage with the music and characters as somehow real enough.

But I was won over. I was turned round even to being deeply moved, admiration, enjoyment, respect by the end of Act 2. I’ve found this true of other later 20th-21stc staged productions: they start slow; Act 1 develops the situation to the point where in Act 2 we may engage deeply with what happens to this set-up situation, place, characters. That partly happened here. Mostly my engagement came from the Sycorax and Caliban matter. And the second half had far more lines from Shakespeare.

The four lovers waking from their dream spell

I cannot say I liked the long-drawn out triumphant happiness of all the characters at the ending: it’s tedious, repetitive, negates for me what went before. I’m told that is what you find in Baroque operas. But a couple of months ago, Jim and I went to the West End Cinema in DC to see Don Giovanni (Peter Mattrei the singer) from the Teatro alla Scala. Marvelously cynical and it ended almost immediately after Giovanni is pulled undergrown by the man who would have been his father-in-law had he married Donna Anna (Ann Netrebko). All we see is Leporello (Bryn Terfel) seeking a new place. Since this is patently a 21st century work, there is no need for this Busby-Berkeley let’s get everyone on stage beaming at the audience close. But then I did say this was kind of gay game.

I realize I’ve not talked much about the actual singing or music. The movie-theater I was in had the sound too high at times, but FWIW, I thought the singing of Daniels as Prospero effective, Didonato as Sycorax moving. It was ensemble and mostly no one but else but De Niese (marvelous) as Ariel emerged. It was more I was aware of the humor or sadness as I listened. The four lovers when first seen are singing a song about the pleasures they anticipate (over and over) and the innocent words become salacious; often the words seem ironically juxtaposed to the music provided or scene itself. We are not really scared ever or awed.

Claire (Helena) is someone often seen in secondary roles at the Met

I do hope there were not so many castrati as these Baroque productions suggest. Izzy says yes though especially in the Catholic Church. How cruel economic desperation and the search for prestige makes people.

See the Classical Review, the New York Times review and Clever Concoction from Yahoo.

Don’t miss it.

Ariel failing to blow on her shell

Ellen

A Thrush singing in Dorsetshire

Dear friends and readers,

This foremother poet blog on Amy Clampitt, is done differently from most. I was so taken by her “The Hermit Thrush” after reading a review in Women’s Review of Books of a newly published book of her poems, that I wrote a brief foremother poet posting and then put this poem on Wompo — at whch there was an outpouring of Thrush poems in reponse. So this is Amy Clampitt amid the thrushes. I found 2 UTube videos where one can hear the thrush’s song and watch a couple: the one above and one at the end of the blog.

Jim and I don’t share that many favorite poems but one is Basil Bunting (Yorkshire poet)’s (part of which forms the epigraph to my Reveries under the Sign of Austen, Two):

A thrush in the syringa sings.

‘Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things.

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things,
fear, hunger, lust.’

O gay thrush.

(1964)

Syringa is sweet-smelling lilacs and Austen planted one in her first garden in Southampton for the sake of a line by Cowper that includes the syringa.

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

The latest issue of Women’s Review of Books (Jan/Feb 2012) is particularly rich and fine, and among its essays are no less than three on women’s poetry. One of these Amy Clampitt whose name I’ve heard before was written about in such a way I longed to read her poetry. In no time I found this masterpiece:

The Hermit Thrush

Nothing’s certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us
back, year after year, lugging the
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there’s no knowing what the slamming
seas, the gales of yet another winter
may have done. Still there,

the gust-beleaguered single spruce tree,
the ant-thronged, root-snelled moss, grass
and clover tuffet underneath it,
edges frazzled raw

but, like our own prolonged attachment, holding.
Whatever moral lesson might commend itself,
there’s no use drawing one,
there’s nothing here

to seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue
(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or
any no-more-than-human tendency—
stubborn adherence, say,

to a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to
hold on in any case means taking less and less
for granted, some few things seem nearly
certain, as that the longest day

will come again, will seem to hold its breath,
the months-long exhalation of diminishment
again begin. Last night you woke me
for a look at Jupiter,

that vast cinder wheeled unblinking
in a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled
toward an apprehension all but impossible
to be held onto—

that no point is fixed, that there’s no foothold
but roams untethered save by such snells,
such sailor’s knots, such stays
and guy wires as are

mainly of our own devising. From such an
empyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as

in the end untenable. Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with

thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry’s cool poultice—

and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us that still sets its term
to every picnic—today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet—

and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk’s-cowl overcast,

with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end

unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive—
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human—there’s

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing

Amy Clampitt

Said to be a hermit thrush

A biography with reviews and poetry linked in. If she be not a foremother, where are foremothers to be found?

And here is the outpouring of thrush poetry from the women poets and lovers of poetry from Wompo (Women’s Poetry list) whence we had an outpouring of thrush, with photos and another UTube performance of a bird. These were placed on Wompo over three days. Friends, were Congress to enact this draconian censorship bill on behalf of the movie and music industry and other powerful corporations who the Internet takes business from (narrow public media owned by a few) and other powerful institutions threatened by the Net this is the sort of thing they’d silence, black out.

By Margo Berdeshevsky (which she shared with us):

Of the Song Bird

Legend tells of the community of birds who had wings but no song as yet : of a contest offered them by the god : of the prize of song—offered to that bird who could fly the highest : of the tiny dun white-spotted-thrush who knew it had no powers to fly high enough to win and wanted to—

Who crept, instead, who hid her small self in a white eagle’s feathered crown to fly far higher than all others : who dozed there, dreamed there, concealed in her carrier’s flight, and longing—and when her eagle tired, she who knew, and bounded out and upward farther still—

Legend tells of the coveted prize of song she heard and learned there, in the heights : of the thrush who returned with the song of spheres in her thirsty small throat, who knew she had won by cheating : who saw the gathering of birds below—a community, receiving, each, their entitled songs—

Legend of the thrush who went away then, hid in the deepest of forests out of shame—but who could not help her song from rising, even in those stands of webbing vine and shadow—of a quest for beauty, of goodness as we barely know it but beg to receive it—that it brings us to longing, only—

Frailty, that rarely, like the thrush, the gorgeous song in us climbs, a bird ashamed of its arriving at a possession of beauty by unsanctioned means, a slouching off to such a dim-lit place where the song erupts in spite, its open-winged remembering, seining from the quiet—

We decided that these thrush poems project world views and tell us much about their poets:

The Laughing Thrush

O nameless joy of the morning

tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there

song unquestioning and unbounded
yes this is the place and the one time
in the whole of before and after
with all of memory waking into it

and the lost visages that hover
around the edge of sleep
constant and clear
and the words that lately have fallen silent
to surface among the phrases of some future
if there is a future

here is where they all sing the first daylight
whether or not there is anyone listening

White-crested laughing thrush

— W. W. Merwin

Thrushes

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living – a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce,
a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
And a ravening second.

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.

With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself – while for him,
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and
above what
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness
Of black silent waters weep.

Ted Hughes

A cruel poem, embodying the cruelty of the natural and human worlds.

A darkling thrush

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy

*******************
Turning back to women’s poetry and thrushes, it’s been suggested that in women’s poetry one finds women poets who identify physically and intimately with small animals. (See Women’s faery poetry). For a near contemporary we have Mary Oliver

Am alert watchful thrush

And to go back in time, two from my favorite era, the 18th century. This is in the spirit of Robert Burns’s To a Mousie, or a similar vein. It really belongs to an early part of the animal rights movement; other poems (often by women) against experiment and really empathizing with (for example) cats are part of this earlier context.

Elegy: On finding a young THRUSH in the Street, who escaped from the Writer’s Hand, as she was bringing him home, and, falling down the Area of a House, could not be found

Mistaken Bird, ah, whither hast thou stray’d?
My friendly grasp, why eager to elude?
This hand was on thy pinion lightly laid,
And fear’d to hurt thee by a touch too rude.

Is there no foresight in a Thrush’s breast,
That thou down yonder gulph from me would’st go?
That gloomy area lurking cats infest,
And there the dog may rove, alike thy foe.

I would with lavish crumbs my Bird have fed,
And bought a crystal cup to wet thy bill;
I would have made of down and moss thy bed,
Soft, though not fashion’d with a Thrush’s skill.

Soon as thy strengthen’d wing could mount the sky,
My willing hand had set my captive free:
Ah, not for her, who loves the muse, to buy
A selfish pleasure, bought with pain to thee!

The vital air, and liberty, and light,
Had all been thine: and love, and rapt’rous song,
And sweet parental joys, in rapid flight,
Had led the circle of thy life along.

Securely to my window hadst thou flown,
And ever thy accustom’d morsel found;
Nor should thy trusting breast the wants have known,
Which other Thrushes knew, when winter frown’d.

Fram’d with the wisdom Nature lent to thee,
Thy house of straw had brav’d the tempest’s rage;
And thou, thro’ many a spring, hadst liv’d to see
The utmost limit of a Thrush’s age.

Ill-fated Bird! and does the Thrush’s race,
Like Man’s, mistake the path that leads to bliss;
Or, when his eye that tranquil path can trace,
The good he well discerns, thro’ folly miss?”

——Helen Maria Williams

(1790)

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

Ode to the Missed Thrush

Charlotte Smith

The Winter Soistice scarce is past,
Loud is the wind, and hoarsely sound
The mill-streams in the swelling blast,
And cold and humid is the ground[;]
When, to the ivy, that embowers
Some pollard tree, or sheltering rock,
The troop of timid warblers flock,
And shuddering wait for milder hours.

While thou! the leader of their band,
Fearless salut’st the opening year;
Nor stay’st, till blow the breeze bland
That bid the tender leaves appear:
But, on some towering elm or pine,
Waving elate thy dauntless wing,
Thou joy’st thy love notes wild to sing,
Impatient of St. Valentine!

Oh, herald of the Spring! while yet
No harebe1l scents the woodland lane,
Nor starwort fair, nor violet,
Braves the bleak gust and driving rain,
‘Tis thine, as thro’ the copses rude
Some pensive wanderer sighs along,
To soothe him with thy cheerful song,
And tell of Hope and Fortitude!

For thee then, may the hawthorn bush,
The elder, and the spindle tree,
With all their various berries blush,
And the blue sloe abound for thee!
For thee, the coral holly glow
Its arm’d and glossy leaves among,
And many a branched oak be hung
With thy pellucid missletoe.
Still may thy nest, with lichen lin’d,
Be hidden from the invading jay,
Nor truant boy its covert find,
To bear thy callow young away;
So thou, precursor still of good,
0, herald of approaching Spring,
Shalt to the pensive wanderer sing
Thy song of Hope and Fortitude.

The above too has a larger specific context from the time: poems about nature in a time of war (Napoleonic). It fits in with some eighteenth century poetry by poets like Thomson and Cowper, discussed by Favret (her last name) in a recent brilliant moving article in PMLA (“Still Winter Comes”, PMLA 124:5 (2009):1548-61

Just listen to that gay song and watch at the Metro Toronto Zoo with people commenting.

Ellen

Alexandra, from The Night Bookmobile

Dear friends and readers,

A couple of years ago now I became aware of how graphic novels have grown up; they are no longer fancied up comic books; the art and words can be as complex and moving as many a sheer verbal longer novel. What happened was I went to see Tamara Drewe, a film adaptation of one of Posy Simmonds’s marvelous graphic novels, and I so liked the movie, I wrote a blog about it, then bought myself a copy of the book so I could really take it in, and discovering it to be a satire on literary life:

Posy Simmonds, from Tamara Drewe

as well as a moving account of several characters’ lives over one year (loosely based on a Thomas Hardy story), went on to get myself a copy of Gemma Bovary, which I liked just as much, again a moving account of a modern Emma Bovary who lives in London and moves to France, truly empathized with:

Gemma learning to shop sensibly in Normandy

Then I went on to buy myself a copy of a group of graphic novels called Gothic Classics, which included witty and pleasing re-dos of Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho (!), Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (female vampire story):

Emily St Aubert writhing from nightmare

Catherine Morland and Henry and Eleanor Tilney take their country walk

an Edgar Allen Poe story; and, for Izzy, Nancy Butler and Sonny Liewe’s Sense and Sensibility (strongly influenced by Andrew Davies’ 2008 film adaptation),
See interview with one of the authors

and a friend bought me Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a memoir of growing up in Iran, originally in French, whose strong content goes into real world and nationalistic politics:

.

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Monksted, the ideal conference place (Posy Simmonds)

Now a few weeks ago someone on my WWTTA (Women Writers through the Ages @ Yahoo) list pointed to an article which suggested that while the typical graphic novel, even by women, had been over-sexed, done from a masculinist point of view, they were all beginning to change to be more like those I had so liked:

Ker-pow! Women kick back against comic-book sexism

The Guardian article also provided a list of graphics to find on the Net, published in periodicals, to buy, to find in libraries. A friend recommended Audrey Niffeneggar’s The Night Bookmobile (I had tried her Time Traveller’s Wife and Izzy and I seen the film adaptation). First I read the strips as they appeared in an online newspaper, and so liked them, got myself the book.

Tonight I had intended to plunge into writing just about The Night Bookmobile, thinking I had written before here on this or my other blogs on Posy Simmonds as well as my other three treasures. And these would provide context. No such thing. I know I have brief and longer postings I sent to WWTTA over Gemma, Tamara, Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe (who I am chuffed to be able to say the authors’ treated in the more empathic spirit I did in my paper), Emily St Aubert, not to omit Marjane. But I can’t pile it all in here — something I used to do by mistake, make overlong blogs — I’ve already strained my readers’ attention with what I’ve referred to. So I’ll just begin with Niffenegger’s Night Bookmobile

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It startled me:

Back cover left side

It was even more melancholy than Simmonds (it was deeply so) and reminded me of Guy Andrews’s free adaptation of Austen’s P&P as Lost in Austen and had allusions to Jorge Borges’s, depictions on the shelves of the covers and titles of the heroine’s favorite books from childhood, adolescent, young adulthood, and didn’t leave out books I read to my daughters in early childhood, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon one of them. and just hit home too.

The titles are not my favorite ones, more fantasy and far fewer of the heroine’s text and Anglophilic books I loved

It doesn’t matter. What I really loved was how it made no compromises with what the world says we are supposed to be made happy by and accept.

It takes one through the stages of a heroine’s life, each of which are marked by her simply being older and finding the book mobile again.

Each time she is drawn as much older.

Each time the shelves are stuffed fuller. Each time the librarian (a male) is more welcoming and she is led into other parts of the book mobile.

Towards the close there’s a version of a book reading room that reminds me of the one at in the Jefferson building in the Library of Congress, what I’ve seen of the old British Museum, a Jorge Borges circular place of rows of seats around a card catalogue with everyone reading.

No irony, no pretense of her being a misfit. The opening reminded me of Lost in Austen. Our heroine has such a boy, dressed so down, so flat, so lank, so unimaginative, watching TV. She wanders far grimmer streets.

She seeks out Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone

Amanda Price in Lost in Austen lives in London; this woman lives in some more provincial city or suburb of the US: nothing but malls, cheap stores, empty streets. She leaves said boyfriend. Who wouldn’t? But there is no Mr Darcy and fantasy land to escape too, only this book mobile with this librarian. Each time the books added are those she’s read though sometimes we hear of children’s books she’s read. Pat the Bunny (which I didn’t read as a child but I read to my children). Gradually she begins to ask if she can stay; and then can she be a librarian too. Alas, he cannot give her this position and he can only stay the night. We see the book mobile drive off in dawn.

By this time the model is Goodnight Moon in feel and several of the frames evoke it.

It seems the only way to become a librarian in this novel is to die; but upon taking a bottle of pills, the book mobile appears once more. The page has small frames of bottles and slippers and her looking at us surrounded by books she can’t reach, her in middle age.

Almost there (the title of the second volume of Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir)

And then there it is. The last line of the book evokes it, only the reality is she has died and yet at the same time become a librarian at last:

Note the words resonate with our present heartless economic system which leaves huge numbers of people unemployed or underemployed or menially employed or make tiny sums of montye. The words of congratulations in our world are: “You’re hired.”

At heart it’s partly a disguised suicide story.

The cover shows her cradling her book

I was so surprised as the open sadness of it. Also at how comforting it was at the same time.

She is reading for two

The Night Bookmobile made me remember my love of girls’ books and how much they had meant to me — even though my choices were so much different from Alexandra’s: Judy Bolton was the one I loved.

One problem is Niffenegger is not as good a visual artist as Posy Simmons. Not as lovely and pleasing. She also lacks Simmonds’s undercutting ironies that are so saturnine and capture our world just as surely. Still … this is so much better than most one comes across in steely feel and has its strong truth with no pandering or compromises.

It makes me want to try Niffenegger’s The time Traveller’s Wife once again. I have faced up to my not being able to read seriously at night and if I want to do this — and read other books I long to — I must go slower and do less projects, interweaving them with projects, papers, books, and teaching during the day.

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A Heraldic map of Cranford by Posy Simmonds!

Thus do these things all come together. A tentative sort of conclusion: womens’ graphic novels keep the patina of humor, wit, jokes and/or fantasy on the surface and when they are advertised, that’s what emphasized. But the predominant mood in these all is semi- or outright protest, a quiet sadness to devastating melancholy. This fits in with a certain kind of woman’s novel that remains my favorite — and often wins the Orange Prize.

So, for example, Simmonds has done her typical artwork to illustrate the town of Cranford in the companion to the film series.

Did you know gentle reader and viewer she made the map and envisoned one of the stories woven into the Cranford (out of Elizabeth Gaskell) mini-series.

Posy Simmonds’s illustration for Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow

Now the film adaptation called Cranford Chronicles brings together a group of stories by a woman so tyipical of girls’ and women’s books: a self-reflective ironic re-do of My Lady Ludlow (also sympathy for the disabled narrator), Mr Harrington’s Chronicles, (the doctor whose first concern is the patient’s health) and the second season brings in Mary Smith, who left a governess autobiography.

As time and the spirit permits, I shall go on to write more of Simmonds and lesser known graphic illustrators and novelists.

Ellen

Dear friends and readers,

I went to see this yesterday with Izzy and we both liked it very much. I recommend it as a superbly well done commercially oriented film — as were Mereilles/Channing-Williams and Caine’s Constant Gardner and Boorman/Davies Tailor of Panama — and doubtless the 1965 Spy who Came in From the Cold, famed from the cast of Richard Burton (and I’ll add, looking back), Cyril Cusack, Rupert Davies, Claire Bloom, Robert Hardy, Michael Horden, a Martin Ritt (director, producer), Paul Dehn (writer) product.

Probably few noticed that the screenplay here was attributed to Bridget O’Connor, with Peter Straughan; and at the end O’Connor was listed as having died and the film was said to be in her honor. LeCarre was a major producer so major influence. I’ve seen O’Connor’s name listed before — in the 1977 Tinker Tailor credits somewhere (it was written by Arthur Hopcroft, directed by John Irvin produced by Jonathan Powell) and again the 1982 Smiley’s People (written by John LeCarre himself with the assistance of John Hopcraft, director Simon Langton, producer Jonathan Powell).

All this does matter — at the BBC who wrote the screenplay is the dominating continuing presence and in commercial films who directs is in charge. The company matters so the 77 and 82 films were not sheerly commercial products, though made by BBC2 to be popular, with an eye of seeking a large adult audience, which they both did. Still they did not have to make a big profit and who produces — he or nowadays she gets to say what is spent. But LeCarre’s films have each time been commercial products and what’s more each time they are a roster of not just who’s who in English filming but who are the effective actors, the ones who give virtuoso performances and yet attract an audience: who are the big stars, the ones with “old” prestige, who’s up and coming.

One difference between this and those previous is even less attention to women; except Little Drummer Girl (which I’ve not seen) and Constant Gardner, women are a minor presence in LeCarre films (though not in the books). Ann (Sian Philips) does turn up critically in 1977 and 1982, and arguably Philips’s one longish scene with Guiness as Smiley in Smiley’s People is central to the film’s meaning — I’ve put it on the Trollope19thCStudies (@ Yahoo) website. Like so many other costume dramas, in the 1982 Smiley’s People (written by LeCarre remember) the landscape is central to the irony and force of the moment.

Sian Philips as Ann and Alec Guiness as Smiley: in the scene he tells her he never wants to live with her again; she wants him still to be there (he cannot get himself to say he cannot bear it) (1982 BBC Smiley’s People)

In 1977 we really did get to know Irene and Ricki Tarr’s concern for her felt so much realer; Irene did not exist simply to be beaten, fucked, and then shot up dead. The 1977/82 Ann had a personality.

It might be that the lesser presence of women is simply lack of time, for the 77 film was 7 episodes of 290 minutes (5 hours or so) and this 2011 film was 127 minutes (2 hours plus). But I doubt it: it was indicative, not of LeCarre’s misogyny, but our times which the film did reflect.

First its aesthetics: it’s fast-moving and you have to pay attention, epitomizing moments are swift, and except for rare moments — as when Gary Oldman as Smiley reports his scene with Carla — who does not appear and enacts it out for them both as memory in front of Bernard Cumberbatch as Peter Gwilliam — no soliloquys. (The 1977 had many.) It communicates through the pictures, the stills, the mise-en-scene which swirls around the actors. A hard mean tough environment; I can hardly recall a scene in the country except when we are with Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux and then the land looked as bleak and worn as Mark Strong. All city this one, all steel buildings, small rooms, cement places, dives, and the actors photographed to make them look seedy and however glamorous not pretty but with real hard skin and pocked marked and irregular features like the rest of us — for real. I don’t know how cinematographers manage this nowadays but they do.

Flashbacks galore – in order to get the complicated story line in. A use of music to quickly evoke a mood.

Then its big problem: the cold war is over. LeCarre’s book is much better than a tirade against communism; in fact it’s about how Karla and Smiley are alter egos, and organizations as treacherous. As everyone knows, what John LeCarre did that was remarkable was to endow the detective and spy story with serious political content for the first time. They are not frivolous Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes stories. They mirror the human condition in the world’s marketplaces, at business and how these deform personal relationships. He made the popular form carry serious weight. But still there was this “enemy,” the bad guy and that was played upon in the 77 film.

So “the enemy” gone. One result was to bring out LeCarre’s apolitical themes, the universal ones. This was a film about betrayal. The necessity of betrayal, not only did Bill Hayden betray his best, indeed homoerotic friend, Jim Prideaux, but to survive everyone seems to have to betray some one else. More you must betray your best self to survive.

The final moments were Jim Prideax shooting Hayden through the head at long distance. Yes Hayden had sent him on a mission where he was nearly killed and then tortured, and now maimed emotionally for life. Mark Strong did convey the loneliness of the man who has to recluse himself; he is good to the young fat boy who is not manly, but strains to do. He was made up to look at all sixes and sevens, distraught like Ian Bannen (the 1977 Jim), but somehow was different and memorable:

A coward’s act, mean somehow, made to feel right: he has been destroyed by the betrayal.

We also have Smiley coming home to Ann (who as I say we never see): she has betrayed him with lots of men (this is a theme of LeCarre, the hero whose pride is ravaged by his inability to keep his chief woman faithful to him); Oldman hesitated ever so slightly but then went forward, we saw him pat her hand and then he turns to go upstairs. He will tell her nothing.

This film stressed how Smiley lied to Ricki Tarr when Smiley did not tell Tarr that Irene had been murdered in order to get Tarr to go to Paris and risk his life again. Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr is emphatically made lower class, that class matters is made clear in this film.

Tom Hardy, 2011 Ricki Tarr, from another world

In 1977 Bennet as Tarr is told the truth, Tarr does not want a family as in this one — picking up on the need for sentimental haven in our world — but he did want to escape to Scotland with her and is made to see the ironic failure such a scheme would produce. He did not need to go to public school in 1977.

Hywell Bennet, the 1977 Ricki, a blonde Rufus Sewell (Ladislaw in the 94 Middlemarch; Clarkson in the recent Christianizing film on abolitionism)

All this — from the patting of a woman’s hand to the strong sense of hierarchy and bosses and no confidences in one another at all — reminded me of The Godfather and that’s the central thing I’ll emphasize. This was a Godfather LeCarre: harder, meaner tougher endlessly meaningless world than the 77 film. The lighting, the square way Colin Firth as the central traitor was caught again and again (evoking deliberately an aging Marlon Brando). Gary Oldman was dressed to remind us of Alec Guiness and he imitated him at times, but he never looked distressed, he never seemed upset inwardly, no tremors. Guiness had a lot of this. The males cried in the 2011 film, but it was sudden, over quickly and then they looked simply grim. At the film’s end when Smiley has betrayed himself, really to no purpose, he comes into the committee room and takes over Control’s seat. The outfit is his. Alec Guiness was an aging Hamlet, hesitant, wishing he didn’t have to, and he eludes the camera in the last scene, sneaking into his house; Oldman is Fortinbras, taking over and the ironic joke is the same one.

Something is lost when you do this, maybe a lot. In the feel, the quality of the humanity. I watched an interesting program on what happened to the movies in the early 1950s when they were purged of socialism altogether – there was to be no feel-good community type fable, none of this Good Companion J. B. Priestley stuff common in 1930s films and still be found as the iconic joking of “we are all in this madhouse together” the Carry on British films (Guiness was part of that era).

Well everyone in 2011 Tinker Tailor is going it alone. [I hope my reader realizes the human community could be presented very differently; as utterly interdependent and doing much in relation to another cooperatively; but this is a no-no politically since the 1950s. Yes, Mrs Thatcher there is such a thing as society.]

And yes the corollary problem was the previous film. Every time you remake something deservedly famous you have this. The film-makers opted for compromises. Sometimes they imitated and deliberately repeated. It was done so well the first time. The actors have to make a decision, whether to evoke the previous actor not not. Oldman did. Firth did not. In the two Sense and Sensibilties of 1995 and 2008: as Hattie Morahan doesn’t replace Emma Thompson as Elinor but is as good so Gary Oldman to Alec Guiness (who he nonetheless had in mind). But at least the S&S films had other films before and after. This one has only the one. It was also a transposition type: all the major characters kept, all famous quips, all hinge points (central turns in the action) faithful to the book in both 1977 and 2011 (and also 1982).

The result as a mixed bag for the second actors Cumberbatch was not a repeat of Jayston but he was not used in a new in-depth way. He was mostly just a hard-action kind of figure, except when he suddenly broke down in a flashback that showed us he was a homosexual and had broken up with his lover to keep his career looking like a heterosexual type, and a short dialogue with a girl who aggression at him he refuses is then explained. At film’s end he is grinning in complicity (smirking is closer to it) as Oldma takes over. This actor can do much better than that (see Small Island). Michael Jayston who had played Rochester brilliantly (1972 BBC mini-series) as Peter was a genuine “student-pupil” learning about the complexities of the world as he sat (several times) with Smiley listening to Smiley tell stories.

Guiness as Smiley talking to Jayston as Peter (who is made uncomfortable)

Ciarhan Hinds had hardly a moment before us (Roy Bland), the part of Toby Esterhase was cut severely (it had been Bernard Hepton) and instead of someone who broke under pressure and became a go-between we seem to get a kind of cartoon figure reminding me of Jacobean drama when someone could be so swiftly hired to murder anywhere. Just tell him where. Toby Jones as Percy Alleline was given more, and he was a kind of dwarf figure, a bully.

The two longer scenes for secondary actors: Ricki Tarr. Tom Hardy was brilliant as a broken man, very handsome and sexy, actually tender-hearted. That was maybe an improvement for Ricki Tarr in 1977 was the drop-dead beautiful Hywell Bennet, a matinee idol type and we watched him have a romantic idyll with Irene where he was clearly getting secrets out of her and nothing more until the last moment when he seemed suddenly to care, more for himself — to escape to Scotland (the old dream I have — let’s escape to Cornwall I is mine). LeCarre’s last book with Smiley had him in Cornwall with a cottage where Ann visits a lot.

And Connie Saches. Kathy Burke. Old and fat and not getting “fucked” enough — so she says. Women are allowed some weight and presence when they are not bed-able it seems. Her scenes were moving. She had been discarded; she had memories. She was like Liv Ullman in some Bergman film going over the family pictures. It was done by Dorothy Tutin in 1977 and 1982, and in the later with a cat. No cat here. One can measure the distance we’ve gone – where we are ambiguously in the presentation of women in commercial films — by looking at their typology; Kathy Burke is in type like those who played Helen Mirren’s sidekicks as decent police officers in Prime Suspect; Dorothy Tutin was costume drama heroine in the 1970s, doing starring roles in South Riding. Burke was never a heroine type like this yet she is accorded much compassion.

She is at her finest reminiscing in front of her computer — that was an anachronistic moment folks, but it’s okay (like clocks in Shakespeare)

Hard to say if Colin Firth as Bill Haydon was a secondary actor. He emerges first as a continuing presence towards the end. He was not given as much as Ian Richardson who does evil very well. Rather Firth was a hard man, hardened by the world, sitting there in his elegant suit when he is exposed. I thought to myself (as we all take these stars across roles) it must be a relief for him for once not to be the suffering hero, all moral, but he was oddly more vulnerable than Richardson. When he smiles at Strong, he looks like he means it. His last lines were something new: he asks Smiley to look after the young woman in his apartment, give her his bank account and oh yes at least tell her he loved her (looking like this was the necessary).

Looking back with remorse

It was Charles II’s let not poor Nelly starve. And oh yes there’s a young man there too, let him off softly. We never knew about Bill Hayden’s bisexuality in 1977 (it’s in the book). Richardson and Hayden both care nothing for Ann, they use her.

I’ve skipped some, John Hurt as Control. He was hardly there enough, so much going on around him as the film provided five things happening at once.

One place this film was better, much, than the 70s was the “faux” immigrant types were gone. None of this kind of “twisted human beings with funny accents” that mar the 1977 and 1982 films; they are gone by the 1990s. So there’s an improvement in filmic outlooks.

Last night I finished watching the 1982 Smiley’s People. People may not remember that ends with Guiness as Smiley setting a trap for Patrick Stewart as Karla and two of them confronting one another at end. The core of the book is the total destruction of a potential family unit ruthlessly: Karla’s, the woman who was his mistress (Eileen Atkins) and a daughter, now a permanent inhabit of a mental asylum. Karla is caught because he wants to reach the pathetic daughter. In that one a (much weaker) Peter Gwilliam says to Smiley something like ‘perk up,” you won.” To which Guiness says: “Did I?”

Karla and Smiley looking at one another (1982 Smiley’s People)

Well this core complicated apprehension was the idea at the heart of this film too. Loyalty: Smiley was loyal to his organziation, his institution in all three films (77 Tinker Tailor, 82 Smiley’s People and now this). Le Carre has said Smiley is not a hero, and should not be admired. In an interview in 1982 LeCarre said:

Another reason for my impatience with George Smiley is that I am no longer able to resolve his excuses. There is something specious to me now about his moral posture. . . . We Empire Babies were brought up thinking that we messed with things so that others could have clean hands. But I believe that someone who delivers up responsibility for his moral conscience is actually someone who hasn’t got one.

Le Carre apparently thinks in heroic terms: “Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage.” Who’s a hero and who’s not.

An intelligent critic of LeCarre’s Smiley stories (Myron Aronoff) has written on this: “One might also ask whether Smiley’s anguished soul-searching mitigated the consequences of his actions? Is it preferable to withdraw from the arena & leave unsavory activities to those who lack moral scruples & who are therefore untroubled by the ethical implications of their actions.”

This is the old problem Thomas More saw in Utopia and Robert Bolt repeated in A Man for All Seasons. Co-opted if you join in, only shaping or modifying events, destroyed probably if once you come in, you opt out, unless you can flee very far.

I say, well yes — so did More, so does LeCarre through the books. It does matter for there is no hope if you don’t, and in this 2011 film Strong, Firth, Oldman, Tom Hardy all grieve over their actions. They all regret what they have done and what they continue to do. What I liked about the Boorman/Davies Tailor of Panama was Geoffrey Rush as the Jewish tailor gone anglophilic regretted intensely much of what he did and was an utterly unheroic (even dancing with the he-man star type, Pierre Bosnan, a Double o7 type).
Regret for one’s life as lived, remorse is central to all LeCarre’s best fictions. LeCarre bettered Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in his book and this film took that one step further.

The point of LeCarre’s fiction to start with was to counter the absurdity of James Bond films. I fear in that vast audience of people (every seat in the house taken ladies and gentlemen) many will not come away understanding this at all. That’s the worst of it, along with the minimum portrayal of women.

What has Peter learned? the film says not a moral lesson …

Ellen Moody

Francis Abingdon as the Comic Muse by John Hickey (from her role in Burgoyne’s Fair Maid of the Oats)

Dear friends and readers,

On and off for the past couple of months, I’ve been reading Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth-Century Theater with a view to writing a review for publication in an academic journal on it. When I write reviews, I not only read the book with great care, thinking about it as I go, but (unless I really am an expert in the area or, conversely, when I find I can’t stand the book or the material and will still write briefly on it because I promised to), I read a selection of the materials the author read to write it. In the case of Nussbaum, I was eager to read more than I had. I had read some contemporary biographies of the actresses (e.g., Anne Oldfield) and memoirs by them too (George Anne Bellamy), and a few modern biographies (of Oldfield, of Bellamy, Dora Jordan [Claire Tomalin's], Hannah Pritchard, Elizabeth Inchbald) and a few essays on and texts either by them or intended for them to act out (Catherine Clive, Sarah Siddons), and also a few general histories, but this was my opportunity to read more. And I did.

I’d like to share some of this with my reader as it’s just fascinating stuff, relevant to our world today in so many ways, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time to write up coherent notes as I went, plus I was partly directed by my reaction to Nussbaum and my task to check her out, see how accurate were her readings and who disagreed with her and why. I chose to write up two because one swallow does not a summer make and if two don’t either, the pair do reveal the tragedy, pain, and ambivalent lives of loss as well as triumph both women lived.

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Woffington as Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple

Margaret Woffington (1720-60) is one of the women Nussbaum focuses on and like other 18th century actresses still remembered for their supposedly exciting sex life and transgressions on stage, it’s not hard to find sites which purport to give a gist of her life and pictures of her on the Net. Unfortunately, like many of these (and Nussbaum too) what is available is filled with falsifying glamor and puffery, which obscure what was Woffington’s experience of life.

The only full-length book that exists is Janet Dunbar’s Peg Woffington and Her World (1968). On one level, it’s a poor book. It’s a story outline of Woffington’s life interspersed with potted biographies of those she worked with, and imagined thoughts she gives them, nothing of which contains any real insight into the characters of the people. What’s also missing is the keen ethical perspective of Mary Nash’s Provoked Wife (a life of Susannah Cibber in the context of her family, era, musical and stage theater).

OTOH, Considering the meager records (playbills, lists of plays performed from memoirs of the era and various documents) and gross bogus history and legend, calumnies which make Woffington into a monstrous sex-made half-prostitute, and recorded silly exaggerations which idolize her are mostly what’s left from Woffington’s life, Dunbar’s book is a unexpectedly sober, respectful and coherent narrative from which one can draw a probable understanding of the life behind Dunbar’s outline of events of Woffington’s life.

What is available? a very few articles which treat Woffington from an author’s agenda-driven point of view (nowadays a favorite is her penchant for cross-dressing); the ODNB biography; A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, ed. Highfill, Burnim, Langhans (1993); Nussbaum’s chapter in her book and the first writing; and a 1760 biographical memoir (Memoirs of the Celebrated Mrs Woffington). This last is disgraceful, a document which testifies to the shameful tone of writer’s mind. Suffice to say that as an adolescent Peg was perhaps “discovered” by a French impresario woman who was looking for talent for fair-ground, and this memoir presents part of this time as Peg, an 11 year old giving herself up to fellatio and other forms of oral and anal sex to young men out of sheer love of it. The tone of the memoir throughout is leering and voyeuristic.

Margaret Woffington spent her life as an actress living on her own and now and again she lived with different well-known males and she did not attempt to hide this. None of them had the high friends that Anne Oldfield’s first choice did — Arthur Maynwarning was attached to the Queen and the highest whigs. Garrick’s popularity and position did not cut anywhere near that high. Peg really defied many norms: she did not even try to appear chaste or virginal when not married. Like Clive, she seems not to have had any children. Woffington did not weave total lies of improbably virginity and chastity like Elizabeth Farren. She just let her life be seen.

Several times she found herself ousted from her theater group: either the London and she went to Dublin and then after a while vice versa. Her speciality was the transvestite role: dressing as a men and playing a man’s role nearly straight, dressing as a man and playing it as a travestry (with her woman’s body emphasized): what we can see in this is this the outsider and perhaps a bisexual or lesbian person. Woffington had no children that we know of. Her one long-time liason with Garrick is not atypical in that she apparently did want to marry him but he found her unacceptable as a social choice. Once she married and educated her sister, Polly, and managed to marry her into Walpole’s family (Horace sneered at the man who married the girl) the sister more or less dropped Margaret.

The way Nussbaum treats Woffington’s collusion with the powerful authorities in Ireland (Duke of Dorset) to encourage men to go to war reveals Nussbaum’s agenda: her goal is to counter those who have said women had no effect on politics. Woffington “influenced the political imaginary of the time.” One famous instance of her pronouncing an epilogue (as a “Female Volunteer”) we know about it because the playbill of Woffington dresses as a soldier however with a low cut blouse to emphasize her breasts and a bunch of cloth where a man’s phallus would be exists and it has a an epilogue which reminds me of WW1 posters urging women to send their sons to fight. Nusssbaum is just all ga-ga about how this shows how important and powerful Woffington was. Woffington was then invited to a dinner at an exclusive club with the Duke of Dorset — Dunbar describes this and provides the sycophantic poem Woffington recited. Nussbaum chose Woffington because Woffington was especially known for her cross-dressing. For one of her epilogues see comment.

Nussbaum argues such enactments show Woffington bringing together cross-dressing, sexual transgression and patriotism; she was answered by a satirical pamphlet that defended the English soldier against this attack on their masculinity. It dismisses Woffington’s piece as sexual contamination not genuine patriotism. A later tract, Guide to the Stage (1751) maligned Woffington by claiming she rather than Jacobites lures audience “into a clap”. The variously layered persona is attacked.

Woffington apparently spoke another epilogue, one to the Non-Juror (by Cibber) where she appears as feminine and again nags the audience to be English protestants against “vile banditti” from “Church of Rome” (Charles Stuart). She thus distanced herself from Catholicism, critiqued the festering Jacobitism of Scotland, called French “henpecked” and effeminate.

At the time in Dublin Sheridan was playing one of Voltaire’s radical plays Mahomet ou le Fanatisme and Woffington was in it. The audience was heavily Irish Catholic; they cheered for the villain-hero and insisted he re-say his speech. Sheridan was livid at the actor who did this. The next performance Sheridan forbad this. What emerged was the hostility and anger of the audience towards the players who were co-opted by the Anglo-Protestant establishment into doing such a play to flatter them at the same time as they had Woffington (paid her of course and Sheridan) do these “patriotic” epilogues. They booed Woffington and threw eggs at her when she came on stage. Sheridan fled. The theater inside was smashed. The theater was fixed and within a few months everything but to normal but Woffington found herself not appreciated by anyone after all and returned to London.

Nussbaum presents all this as a triumph by not telling us the details, not telling us the realities of what Woffington was enacting and for which side. Does it not matter? Again I cannot see how this is admirable if that’s what Nussbaum wants me to see. I see an actress maligned and castigated, doing reprehensible kinds of urging for money in clothes that make her body a salacious joke. Not that Dunbar is any better, for she does not mention the true or full context; the reader has got to be politically aware, knowledgeable him or herself to understand fully what is happening.

There is at this time nothing written about Woffington that conveys her reality, that tells the politics of it with any humanity or decent values and relates it to our time as I have just done. I suppose it’s in no one’s interests but perhaps the Irish who however will today have a nationalist agenda anyway.

Margaret died young (perhaps a heart attack while on stage) because she ceaselessly worked. People who’ve studied her playbills mention how she seems hardly ever to have taken off. Night after night ceaselessly.

She did make money, enough to support her probably illiterate and very low-in-class mother in Ireland. Surprisingly Nussbaum does agree openly with the earlier biographers which have Woffinton the daughter of a bricklayer and laundry-peddlar woman. Woffington bought a nice house in Twickenham area, Teddington. Several times like Clive she found herself tricked and pressured into taking a much lower salary and she refused. She never wrote defenses of herself. I assume she was not sufficiently educated. In fact we have hardly any writing by her about herself.

Nussbaum presents a version of Woffington’s life which is all success and power and money and achievement. Nussbaum is of the idolizing school. She omits what Dunbar presents under the wraps of conventional dullard speech: such as for example, that Owen M’Swiney, a Signor Angelo, and later in life a Colonel Caesar where the protectors males (M-Swiney and Caesar probably capable of the necessary thug behavior) she kept around her to protect her. From my reading of Anne Halkett’s memoir and other 17th and 18th century women who lost their respectability and had no family or friends or connections to support them (who would have to be answered to), I know a woman living alone was continually at risk for any bully male to break in and try to harass and rape her.

She apparently suffered a stroke while playing Rosalind in As You Like It; she retired to her hard-won house, a villa in Teddington where she was cared for by Colonel Caesar for her last three years.

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Mrs Abingdon as Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love by Joshua Reynolds (1771)

Again there is no good modern biography, a few articles which push an agenda; the ODNB and the Highfill, Burnim and Langhans Biographical Dictionary; Nussbaum’s chapter and an earlier biography, this one written in 1888 (The Life of Mrs Abingdon) – which is however not bad. Like Dunbar’s life of Woffington, this 1888 life of Abingdon provides an outline, some imagined suppositions, and is based on documentary evidence, including this time a revealing series of letters between Garrick and Abingdon, which letters show them to have had high quarrels and frequent bickering.

Frances Abingdon (1737-1815) also rose from very poor people, spent a period as a young girl surviving and promoting herself in whatever way she could, and slowly took on distinctive roles: in Abingdon’s case, they were often a strong, cool, guarded fashionable woman. She became rich men’s mistresses more manipulatively, and the dress was clearly used to distance her from others of her status. She wanted people to forget her origins. She quit the stage more than once. Like Woffington, forced out of London, she went to Dublin and unlike Woffington had a unqualified success monetarily and from the point of view of her reputation. Unlike Woffington, she got two men to leave her big legacies and retired. She was not short lived either as she didn’t exhaust herself the way Woffington had.

From the 1888 biography a complex woman who dressed the way she did out of intense pride emerges. The comic roles she took were quite different from Clive’s (hoyden, chambermaid) or Oldfield (aristocratic witty lady); she took on middling women who were super-elegant and highly intelligent. Her intense engagement was the result of her perpetually beating back her background to show how she was as good as any one else. The facade became her protection.

About 2/3s the way through the biography the anonymous biographer suddenly dumps a huge cache of letters between Garrick & Abingdon on the reader. They are mind-bending. However corrected, they read as real. Abingdon was continually taking offense, tirelessly defensive, ever accusing Garrick, paranoic some might say. But she was tremendously touchy and probably was often slighted. They fight over each iota of status, gain or loss continually. She quit several times. Abingdon’s constant complaints, anger, go beyond something pragmatic, well beyond. She was hurt and angry from within from her experience of life.

She paid the one husband she married to stay away: his jealousy reminds me of the Frenchman who beat his actress wife to death: it’s not sexual or even plain jealousy of her success; it’s something more dangerous; he cannot bear that his wife should do better than he since for him too the rest of the world was despising him. Perhaps that was their initial bond. She too had many epilogues written for her and these do provide a fascinating take on her which somehow emanates from her even if she didn’t write them. (I reprint a typical one in a comment.)

For a narrative life once she gets successful the 1888 biographer gives her the gist of each of her famous roles, little paragraphs about the play’s production, a contemporary review and then onto the next. And after all what were her waking hours but these? It’s wisdom to make this the central text rather than the marginal love and sex stories that occurred in the interstices of time or even her social support network — fragile without the legacies she got from her two lovers. It’s revealing that Mrs Abingdon called herself Frances and made it stick. Not Fanny. I see in that her intense desire for respect. What hidden injuries must she have had.

The most interesting thing Nussbaum tells is that Abingdon was “reputed to have been a servant to a French milliner in Cockspur Street where she learned dressmaking and design. The actresses were supposed to get their own costumes. Nussbaum suggests the rumors of prostitution in youth might have come from her having been a milliner (here she resorts to old-fashioned language: milliners the “prey of unsavory men. regarded as morally suspect). Abingdon would know how to make all sorts of articles of clothing, what was liked. When it came to her to commission clothes once she rose to have a good salary. I remember that George Anne Bellamy mentions sponsoring a milliner to go to France to learn the art of making clothing of all sorts.

Abingdon’s epilogues bring out her role as an icon of fashion. She combined a material milliner with lady of quality she aspired to be. She was adroit in the use of accessories, like fans, pins, flowers (as a girl selling flowers she was known as “Nosegay Fan”). Rather than asserting sexual power through body anatomy she manipulated accessories. The biographer of Elizabeth Inchbald and Sarah Siddons wrote that Abingdon commanded space. Nussbaum insists that Abingdon was not trivialized and lists her famous roles: Widow Bellmore, The Way to Keep Him; Lady Bab in The Maid of Oaks, Mrs Candour in School for Scandal. Abingdon combined a nostalgic or traditional femininity with an avante-garde/modern femininism.

Abingdon dressed just spectacularly jewelled up and got up as Madame de Pompadour. Abingdon broke with a tradition of generic type dressing and dressed individually and sumptuous for each character does seem true; we see these outfits immortalized in paintings which do justice to her costume. A contemporary is quoted saying that Abingdon was consulted as a physician, paid as an artist, people of fashion treat her as an equal, p 232-33. Other women were copied this way: Anna Cartley, Woffington. I remember that Pritchard came from family of staymakers, costumers for stage, said to be consultant to Queen Charlotte; the Pritchards had a warehouse.

I remember reading in Bellamy’s autobiography that she lost a wardrobe worth hundreds of pounds in New Theater at Glasgow; ladies of Edinburgh loaned her more than 40: “some new … as well as very rich” Nussbaum brings in Bellamy’s intense quarrel with Elizabeth Furnival over Bellamy’s outfit to be Cleopatria, which ended in outrageous insults. Furnival stole clothes for Octavia that Bellamy intended for herself as Cleopatra; seamstress fell on her, Bellamy complained to Sheridan.

Nussbaum goes on that Abingdon “mobilized nation’s fashion industry.” Now I thought of Bette Davis in Now Voyager who becomes beautiful and sexy by dressing glamorously. Carole Lombard moves were sales pitches for clothes in the Neiman Marcus mode.

What I’d end on was how she got writers to rewrite Jacobean and Caroline plays for her (by Fletcher, by Massinger) so as to present earlier hard types, strong, abstract roles which if in the end humiliated give as good as they get for most of the play, e.g., The Capricious Lady out of The Scornful Lady; an updated version of an updated version of the heroine in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. Abingdon wanted to enact fantasies of power and one of the famous portraits of her (by Reynolds) comes from her role in the farce, The Sultan where we are asked to take seriously that she reasons the Sultan into changing the nature of his relationship with women and his court, (absurd) Orientalist fantasy. Nussbaum says she “reforms the seraglio, erases erotic power of tragic Eastern woman, and replaces it with comic female sway.” A less admirable aspect of this play is how it despises the eunuch.

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My favorite story of Abingdon: Samuel Johnson liked her so much that he sat in the pit to watch a play he could neither see or hear very well. Boswell pictures Johnson sitting there gravely and attentively.

My favorite picture of either of them is F. Haytley’s Peg Woffington as Mistress Ford (from Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor). I fancy her courage and intelligence shines through:

The interested reader is invited also to look at my Anne Oldfield as actress, and foremother poet-writer blog on Catherine Clive; and what I managed of an etext edition of Bellamy’s autobiography before I discovered this 6 volume autobiography is readily available on ECCO. These women I also bond with. I’ve put some notes on Susannah Arne Cibber as revealed by Mary Nash’s Provoked Wife and briefly defended Sarah Kemble Siddons in my comments too.

Ellen

Dear friends and readers,

My Christmas present from Jim and Izzy (bought by me on their behalf) was the complete set of Prime Suspect seasons, and while I was chuffed to get them, it was not until I opened the box three nights ago now and began to watch again that I realized what a wonderful present I had given myself. From two angles: first off, I had not been understanding or seeing the stories the way they were intended and second, they continue to rivet, move, and thematically fascinate me.

First that the box showed me that the set on Netflix misrepresent the series: stories are left out. Does it matter? yes.

I had suspected there was something wrong, something missing. One of the delights of this series is the mostly marginalized but on going story of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison herself. At the close of “The Lost Child” we had Jane having had an abortion and sitting in the darkness and at the opening of “Scent of Darkness” she had embarked on a fulfilling liaison with Dr Patrick Schofield (played marvelously by Stuart Wilson), the psychologist from “The Lost Child.” How was this? Then what I thought was the next story, about a Bosnian woman who was tortured I was so disappointed to find no Stuart Wilson who I really liked, especially from his relationship with her. Jane Tennison was alone, haunted, often in a black cape and had on DI Haskons with her.

Characteristic still from Season 6

Well, when I opened the box of DVDs for the first time, I found 7 boxes with a couple of boxes having 2 disks; the 6th and 7th also have bonus features (!). In Box 4 I found between the two-hour each film, “The Lost Child” and “The Scent of Darkness,” another 2 hour film: “Inner Circles.” And that there was a mini-series film between “Scent of Darkness” and the 6th series about the torture of a Bosnian refugee where Jane Tennison relocates to Greater Manchester for a stint as a community relations police officer. “Inner Child” lacks the usual crew of people except for Richard Hawley (Di Haskons in all of them) and a cameo appearance of John Benfield (her supervisor, Mike).

One problem with doing this series over several years is the producers could not always get the people back so my guess is her (unlikely) stint as “community relations” person (just what she as an iconoclast and unconventional woman would not be acceptable at or even good at) was the inspired reaction to the producers not being able to get any of their usual people back.

They overcame this partly by the focus on Jane but they clearly also did this for itself. The series has a woman’s novel implicitly working itself out inside the conventions of a police procedural (as the genre is called in Britain). In many of the detective series the film-makers of TV (BBC, the better British channels and PBS) have filmed, the books may have the outlines of an ongoing story’ but most of the time in the TV programs this must be dropped because there are too many programs (when it’s a success). Lynda LaPlante’s (and her successors) creating a series out of their own minds and intended for TV (not based on novels) and not having that many programs or stories per season , there is an evolving story and it matters. Sometimes it presents an ironic or ambivalent contrast to the crime story, sometimes Jane’s emotion out of her own life reinforces the emotion of the crime story, motivates her quest to solve the crime strongly.

To outline: when we first meet Jane (Story 1, Season 1, a mini-series) she is having trouble breaking into the hierarchy of the police force. She cannot get a case to conduct. She is also in a warm relationship with a husbandly man played by Tim Wilkinson – he has broken with his wife who is now pregnant with another man’s child and Jane tries to make dinner for him, the child and herself. We see he can’t get enough jobs in the killing new capitalist structure where people are left to “free-lance” and it hurts their relationship as she sits up night after night — to a breaking point.

Tom Wilkinson plays Peter Rawlins, her partner-lover in the first season

Jane also is straining to spend any time with her biological family; when with them, she must watch TV to keep up with her job and partly ignore them, and this angers Peter.

In story 2 (Season 2, another mini-series) we see her have a casual encounter with a young black officer which is held against her and she must drop as he is going to use it to wrest power.

The 3rd story (Season 3, another mini-series) about transsexuals and child molestation is so powerful and is framed by her at the opening of the story meeting an old lover and having a week with him where she does wrenchingly break it off because he demands she give up her job and he will in turn leave a wife and 4 children. This is scenario we may often see: the aging man leaves a wife and 4 children for a mistress. To her credit, Jane refuses.

The 4th story (Season 4) is the first of three 2 hour films and given a title: “Lost Child.” In this one she has an abortion, the result of her love affair in Story 3. It’s also the story of a child murdered by its mother where almost automatically a man who had been known to sexually molest and abuse children (had spent time in jail for this) was blamed. Jane’s anger is fueled by her own loss, her own ambivalence. The story includes a psychologist, Patrick Schofield (played memorably by Stuart Wilson) who explains and defends the accused young man to Jane.

I now realize that “Scent of Darkness” is Story 6, the the third of the two hour films of Season 4) and did not follow “Lost Child.” It has the most development of Jane’s private or non-professional life of all of them: we see Jane and Patrick
meeting at a movie house, both too late for the show, and discovering neither wanted to see it and then we have these vignettes of them in bed, in the bath, drinking and talking, her working at her latest crime and he watching TV: in this one he seems to betray her by himself taking on as a customer in part the man who wrote the book saying her solution of the first crime was false. The crime part of the story is a re-do of Story 1 (Season 1) about violence against women, how Jane is not permitted a promotion easily, how the men conspire against her to protect their chief. At its end she triumphs over a humiliation, dances with the officer chief who tried to bring her down, and is last with her Patrick at the same dinner party.

Penultimate scene of Scent of Darkness

So how did she get there: to that affair. Well, “Inner Circles,” Story 5 of Season 4, a two-hour movie in which shows her very lonely, picking up the phone to call this psychologist who she had liked and getting his answering machine. Trying twice. She has no circle, she is someone who comes home from her job and watches TV or reads. I see the opening of “Scent of Darkness” was the opening of their affair.

In “Inner Circles,” Jane’s lonely or outcast state may seem deprived, but the inner circles she see are made up of people who as much prey on as they support one another. She has more strength and more distance to be able to feel and act upon more real or un-ambivalent affection for the youngsters of the story than their troubled parents can manage. We see her fellow officers discussing this more than once and she is needled by DCI Raymond (Ralph Arliss), the man who is running the cop shop she is momentarily relocated to: he is having an affair with a woman detective in the office, DS Cromwell (Sophie Stanton) who changes allegiances to Jane during the 2 hours. When she sees them as a pair at a town bar and asks him, where is his wife, he retaliates by saying “at home” and she “she’s fine, she’s still getting it regularly which you’re obviously not.”

At the bar

I immediately recognized Arliss as the hard apparently mean working class male gamekeeper type in the 1977 Love for Lydia. Inner Circles like Story 1 (Season 1) and also “Scent of Darkness” (Story 6, Season 4) reaches back to superb actors from the 1970s series who never made it to total stardom. From Stuart Wilson (Ferdinand Lopez in Pallisers) to Gareth Forwood (Everett Wharton in the same part of the Pallisers) as the murder victim, Dennis Carradine. Again Wilson played the strong alluring male lover while Forwood the man with homosexual inclinations who cannot succeed in the world, weakish, but well-meaning, emotional, a victim type.

Opening shots of Inner Circle: the country club surrounded by a large — green and pleasant — golf club meadow

In my previous three blogs I suggested that each film-story examines another aspect of real life. In “Inner Circle” we move to a contrast between the wealthy, comfortable upper middle milieu, a place of of clubs, of power in police shops and city councils, and the desperately despised poor in public housing like Larchmont Estate from which the people accused of murdering Dennis all come, and in fact the hired killer too. The politics of the piece is the rich people are in cohoots with Raymond and others to blame the poor, do what they can to stimgatize and make the idea of helping such people useless, ludicrous, dangerous in order to protect their own crimes, ruthless appetites, and of course money and power. I noticed Anthony Bate as James Greenlees is the head of the club; he often plays this type (he was Lacoon in the 1970s/80s Smiley films).

Like Paul Endicott, when Greenlees is last scene he is getting into a luxurious car and driving home: at the center of the storm, he gets away with his dealing scot-free because he knows how to stay on the right side of custom and law

This time the murderer Maria Henry (Jill Baker), an upper class woman lawyer who wants to hide her financial dealings and her long-time friend, Dennis’s incompetence is leaking it out. She and Greenlees and her lover, Paul Endicott (James Laurenson), also a member of the club have Arliss to cover up for them and present the crime as an act engendered by poor people living in council housing (ironically named Larchmont Estates) who hated a homosexual upper class male type and tortured him in some humiliating way before strangling him.

Bird’s eye shot of Larchmont Estate courtyard: no grass here

So the crime becomes ammunition against social programs too. Early on in the show everyone assumes that Mickey Thomas (Jonathan Copestake) murdered Dennis with the help of the young woman the police do take in, Sheila Bower (Julia Rice). Raymond’s police come to the housing project and he panics and flees, and runs into a car which smashes him to death. Even half-way through the show the country club types, and Raymond are still trying to pin the crime on Thomas and Sheila.

Mickey Thomas looking up at helicopter surveillance over Larchmont (perfect symbol of our time), cursing them but also panicking

Only this pair of young people didn’t torture or strangle him. They were just trying to burglarize the building in which Dennis lived.

Like “Lost Child” and “Scent of Darkness” too much was piled into 2
hours and I didn’t quite get the ins and outs so had to re-watch before I understood what had gone on.

Suffice to say this one made me identify with Maria Henry (Jill Baker) the woman lawyer — this astounded me. Again the series was functioning to extend the sympathetic imagination, this time mine. This upper class lawyer, successful networking made-up hard nosed woman. Well she melts at the behavior of her equally hard but stupid and naive daughter, Polly Henry (played brilliantly by a young Kelly Reilly — Story 1 had a young Ralph Fiennes equally brilliant — and cannot reach her. I burst into tears at one angry set-to between them. Polly does not understand how she is being used and it is through her that her mother Maria’s crime is exposed.

Maria Thomas, the lawyer-mother, tough as nails

Polly Henry, the thick, sullen hurt puzzled daughter, weak and clinging, easily manipulated

Maria now needs to kill the killer of Dennis, Geoff Brennam (Thomas Russell), a sadistic thug because Jane Tennison has realized that Geoff was the paid killer.

Geoff also an inhabitant of the Larchmont Estates, another another of its cement and iron terrace patios

So Maria Thomas tells the easily bullied stammerer, another vulnerable young man, Hamish Endicott (Nick Patrick), Maria’s lawyer-loverm Paul Endicott’s son that Jeff raped and beat and maimed Polly, needling the boy to hammer Jeff’s head to bits. Paul loves Polly from afar:

Polly and Hamish in the country club, children imitating their parents

Hamish has been tormented and mocked and fleeced by Jeff (as he has been similarly sneered at by his father) and a huge amount of raging hostile emotion has built up.

Paul Endicott seemingly the ultra-successful lawyer male (he’s a failure in reality, like Maria needs money desperately)

Maria taps into this easily, manipulating the young man into fancying himself a hero doing a brave deed. Someone a the Larchmont Estate where Jeff lived and did inflict rough cruel sex on Polly saw a red-haired woman in the car with tall young man; when Hamish turns himself in, it’s a matter of deciding whether the woman was Polly or her mother, Maria. Maria could leave her daughter to be blamed (and we see the girl is a narrow, silly person who will probably be destroyed by others later), put that that far she won’t go. She has tried to protect her daughter from her crimes, her life-style, her boyfriends to no avail. Polly wants to live the way she sees her mother does, does not know enough to see how hollow are Maria’s relationships. It is hard to tell whether Maria does love the daughter who instinctively feels her mother does not love her, but when she turns whining to her in the last moment of the show, the mother melts once again.

They are an inner circle inside an inner circle. Jane is in no such inner circles at all — nor is DS Cromwell whom we learn during the show came from an estate like the Larchmonts and understands some of the psychology of the young people burglarizig and behaving in self-destructive ways. It is Cromwell’s way of interrogating the suspects that helps Jane to understand and ferret from them the truths of what happened.

Cromwell makes faux pas that Jane would not: she does not first clear her right to investigate Dennis’s mail at the club

Perhaps Jane and Cromwell are better off with their impersonal relationships. But Jane at least is lonely as we see her making those phone calls to Patrick’s answering machine. And DS Cromwell has been giving herself to that shit Raymond and for all we know may return to him casually once again.

That it’s a mother-daughter relationship gone all wrong and women’s friendship story at its core may come from its film-makers mostly being women as were the first three stories (seasons 1-3). It’s based on a story by a woman, Meredith Oakes; it’s directed by Sarah Pia Anderson and two of the producers were Sally Head and Rebecca Eaton.

Closing moment, Jane and Cromwell (we never do learn her first name) smoking together, sharing cigarettes

Other miseries of human relationships that are explored, dramatized exposed beyond that of how the powerful and rich treat the desperate and poor is how cold and therefore cruel and bullying personalities can twist emotionally loving and warm and weak or uncertain people. How such people will get back either directly or through the very love relationship the strong or bullying person (in two cases here it’s a father and son and a mother and daughter or parents and children) takes advantage of or even promotes.

Some good lines:

On the police fear of the people in the Larchmont Estate and their terror (justified) of the police: Jane: “Whatever happened to community policing?”

Mike, Jane’s superior to Jane and her repeat reply late in the film: “”Politics this is what this is all about use your social skills if you’ve got any …”

Jane Tennison to Maria Thomas: “Tennison: you are refusing to tell us anything. Maria: “I honestly feel I’ve been as fank as I dare be.” In fact that’s so. We see how laws set up to protect people like her. She can claim client confidentiality to hide that she and Dennis were in deep trouble over their buying of a ruin, Burdette House when the city gov’t refused to let them build luxury housing there

I like my Christmas present very much. Prime Suspect was a series of brilliant films which evolved as they went, inventing and changing as the year and times and what was available for actors demanded. (By contrast, Poldark stayed with the books, for all three tries, even the 1996.) Perhaps the people making the 4th season of 3 two-hour films realized they had piled too much in and the series lost some viewer-ship or maybe because it kept gaining, for I can see that they returned to mini-series in the 5th season. I have much to enjoy. But before I watch these for the first time, I shall luxuriate in re-watching the touching affair of Stuart Wilson and Helen Mirren of “Scent of Darkness.” As I say these films demand and repay rewatching.

Ellen

Neiman Marcus, 2nd floor by escalators at Xmas time

Dear Friends and readers,

This year we had two minor disappointments. I really thought we’d get to see the new Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. As in the last few years, surely a star studded movie based on a super-famous good book was made to get academy awards and when better to show it in many theaters than Christmas day. I forgot to reckon in the dysfunctional powers of private property and competition: our two local Landmark theaters bought exclusive rights to this movie; neither are in Virginia and the trains don’t run frequently on regular Sundays.

So we opted for A Dangerous Method. While the screenplay writer was Christopher Hampton, and it had a fine director, good actors and was based on real history of a bleak true ironic sort, it has all the flaws (like epitomizing wooden dialogue) as well as the strengths (beauty, quality themes) of Sunday night costume drama. We did enjoy our meal at Mark’s Duck House. And I watched Frederick Wiseman’s The Store when we got home.

Brief review: How we really “do” Xmas, some of it anyway. Frederick Wiseman’s The Store. It seems he filmed Neiman Marcus mostly during Xmas time, from later Nov to Dec. It adds to the exposure and study of how people really do spend their lives
and how they act “at work.” What they want to be, as in these Texans:

Watch a man across the course of the film make up his mind between a $46,000 or $38,000 fur jacket for a woman — made up of such exquisite fur pieces (from animals not mentioned) and good for everything including jeans!

Lady swathed in furs looks at more furs

rings for frightening prices. Make-up.

And then the workers in the store being led to do exercises in smiling. The long undecorated labyrinths. The actual work done down there for many many tiring hours. The pep talks: we are here to sell. The man thinks doctors are there to save lives and take care of people’s health. Perhaps he has not left The Store lately. The hatred: manufacturers for buyers especially. You might say you see Writ Large here what occurs in less expensive spaces.

Recommended, highly. See Wiseman’s Primates and films on the medical establishment.

A corridor in The Store

Other movies not about Xmas but where things are occurring at Xmas time — which are the best kinds of Xmas movies: so also Huston’s The Dead, Whitman’s Metropolitan (adaptation of Mansfield Park), Taylor’s The Maze

We had a similar obstacle for our Boxing Day outing. This year there didn’t seem to be a show on that I felt we’d surely like. Last year not only was there one of Venice, but there was one of these unexpected extra shows we had not noticed: beautiful studies of the natural world. But we had had some of these magical moments together over several years, so we thought we’d try despite the headlineer (pun intended) being Andy Warhol. I’ve never liked his stuff (so to speak) though I grant it’s memorable, but I had read a longish review in The Nation where the writer presented views of leading critics that Warhol was a great artist, that he was a salesman, self-promoting celebrity who made works to catch attention, that he was both.

I reported on Facebook that Jim thought it all charlatanism. I’m nor sure. Later Jim said this was an exaggeration of what he said. He thought rather that Warhol produced junk and the exhibit (not deliberately but to the knowing person) revealed how the art world is dependent on patrons so that if a slick “operator” careerist, networker can promote his work to a few rich patrons, he’s a made man; and if on top of this he can cultivate other rich, powerful people, he can be called a great artist as it becomes in the interest of everyone to uphold him. (This is different from music and books where you have to try to please a great number of people.)

Honest this is not much different from junk and charlatan (=showman-careerist), and the show did sour Jim’s outlook. It irritated him and seemed to put him out of the mood for looking at other things.

Well I wasn’t sure. It seemed to me that Warhol could be using his parodies of these godawful headlines to expose the stupidity, amorality, and absurdity of different worlds and their media. One struck me especially: on one side of a newspaper painted by Warhol (based on a real one) there was a story of a man murdered by police (a choke hold) where they denied it and got away with this as the death was called accident or suicide. It was a tiny item next to a huge page of advertisements for sales for Gimbel’s. In other words, some of the parodies, imitation, juxtapositions were capable of interpretation as serious social criticism.

OTOH, there was a kind of getting a kick out of doing this for some of them — simply mocking, showing up the stupidity of these newspapers meant for hoi polloi. No vision for humaneness, just accepting the ugly junk. Like Madonna not a bit ashamed as a headline. What kind of understanding does that show of her, from her, and also from Warhol. Jim said I was reading into the things something not there, and that is what others do. It’s like fans make a cult of books that are half-empty and easy (Sherlock Holmes) because they pour into it their own identity politics.

What makes me half-agree with Jim is what I see are Warhol’s followers: an exhibit at the Whitney a couple of years ago of student work: it was drek accompanied by explanations preaching at you. I liked the views expressed but this is not art. I’ve seen this in other exhibits and it ruins rooms and rooms.

At any rate nothing there was edifying and it left me mostly with a sense that I should not mourn the passing of popular newspapers. I had forgotten what they are like: crude, crash, harsh, jeering or absurdly sentimental.

We did go around the museum and saw a few favorite pictures, but as with two years running fully one-quarter of the second floor of the older art part of the building was blocked off. Most of the new building where the Warhol exhibit was is wasted space (like many other recent museums for recent art).

The Harry Callahan which was in the space where the exhibit with the nature studies was last year was not bad. Mostly really they were home-family pictured masquerading as something else (not much), but in the last corridor there was some later work: a row of colored photos of cities around Europe which seemed really to capture some essence of them not often admitted to by being so true to what the camera saw: on a bleak street in Ireland, on Turkey where public space is so empty and all private buildings like prisons with windows not seen, Hong Kong outpourings of vile commercialisms.

A real typical street in Ireland instead of the green fantasies photographers produce in magazines

The real Venice people live in (not Canaletto-like at all)

Perhaps we should have looked at another smaller exhibit of medieval tapestries. But somehow we were not in the mood but by the time we noticed it we had decided to leave. When we got home, I realize we had missed Mark Rothko too (not that I ever find anything to look at in his paintings).

We did have a lovely sunny walk on the mall. The day was quietly lovely and again at night a good meal together and good talk (about the Warhol). What is art? how does the art world work? what is promulgated as fine art? and so on. In truth I still think Warhol is partly doing what Callahan did and what Wiseman in The Store does. Give us a real experience instead of a pretend or phony flattering substitute. But not exactly comforting and except for Wiseman’s film I am not sure it’s art. My criteria is probably that I have to be impressed by some skill or talent, something done outside the ordinary capturing nature which I can’t do.

My real conclusion about this boxing day (what mattered about it) is about the advice I was given by a kind friend a few years about how to endure Christmas (get through the phoniness and fraught emotionalisms of over-expectation). He said to have a private set of rituals, traditions you do each year and keep to them. I know Izzy listens to lovely Christmas music while laying in bed on the 25th. I know I lay in bed late and relax and do little on the 25th, sometimes read a novel for two days that is utterly unrelated to anything I call work. We had a good time on the night before Christmas eve exchanging a few presents with Laura & Rob, and washing down French Christmas cake and a few hors-d’oeuvres with champagne. Perhaps we should have ritual/traditions as my friend advised, but we keep them small and make sure they are acts within our compass, not dependent on someone else and not be religious or too strict about them.

At any rate we are now all Christmas’d out.

Ellen

Dear year-long friends and readers,

From the 19th century: Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

Again at Christmas did we weave
          The holly round the Christmas hearth;
          The silent snow possessed the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,
          No wing of wind the region swept,
          But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

As in the winters left behind,
          Again our ancient games had place,
          The mimic picture’s breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

Who showed a token of distress?
          No single tear, no mark of pain:
          O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
Of grief, can grief be changed to less?

O last regret, regret can die!
          No—mixed with all this mystic frame,
          Her deep relations are the same,
But with long years the tears are dry.

Stonehenge, a drawing by John Constable

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Last night:

Izzy, at her computer, 2011

R. Joyce Heon’s The Dream Again

The dream again. Near Christmas. It is time
To lower and unfold the attic stair
That will not hold a grown-up’s weight, to climb
Into the chill and naptha-scented air.
Here moth will not corrupt, and time must spare
The box of lights and mismatched ornaments
Packed in a carton filled with Angel Hair
And met, as if by sheer coincidence,
With lawn chairs, summer clothes, and two old Army tents.

Mother, an item here belongs to me.
It is a piece of plastic tubing, red
And cane-shaped, which I’ll hang upon our tree
In memory of an old man who is dead,
A neighbor on the block I visited
Daily when I was only three or four.
For months I took that thing with me to bed,
Then stopped and did not take it anymore
After he died. I’ve never known what it was for.

The dream again. We trim the slender tree
With strings of lights so antiquated they’ve
No colors left, hang icicles and see
These acts reflected, wave on frozen wave.
More rituals: the ribbon that we save
To bind leftover boughs to make a spray
Of cedar. Every year, on Christmas day,
These were the fragrant, handmade gifts you gave
Your mother and your father — one upon each grave.

To make room for the presents we arrange
The furniture and, for amusement, play
Old records that, in retrospect, seem strange:
Gene Autry, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye.
I watch you setting out a metal tray –
Santa Drinks Coke — and sing along like one
Who knows what words each character will say,
A sort of deja vu, a knowledge won
From having played the part before, the role of son.

The dream again, the one that always ends
In a light which, while neither cruel nor hard,
Indifferent to my waking thoughts, ascends
In moments made to empty and discard
Like leaves the wind now scatters in the yard.
Yet it is such that I would not confine
It to the space inside a Christmas card
Or the stamped parcels bound with tape and twine,
Sent with regrets for invitations I decline.
So let the light grow dim, allow this dream
Its one still moment, where none may intrude
To hang the stockings which can only seem
Empty reminders of the magnitude
Of love we neither compass nor conclude.
Let the deep twilight gather to the chime
Of three brass angels circling in the nude,
Tinkling above their candles as they climb
The wall in shadows, marking nothing more than time.

Poor yet alert puzzled pussycat: Clary

Ellen

Dear friends and readers,

A third blog on the unusually good police series, Prime Suspect: I’ve now watched The Lost Child, Scent of Darkness , which I want briefly to compare with Christopher Reid and Niall MacCormack’s Song of Lunch, a more typical heroine’s text (a 2 hour film from PBS Masterpiece theater this year), and the older fine mystery thrillers film adaptations of John LeCarre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. So you see how I’ve been riveting myself into wakefulness in the late nights these weeks. These two new Prime Suspects continue the exploration of sexuality, women’s issues (here motherhood) and male violence against women begun in the previous three stories. They also develop Jane Tennison’s story more centrally.

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The last concluding shot of Lost Child

Lost Child

This is the fourth of the Prime Suspect Stories; they have changed format. Story 1 and 2 and 3 were mini-series, each with 4 episodes. Lost Child & Scent of Darkness are both two hours long, the Americanized format of mini-series that winston Graham complained destroyed the attempt to bring back Poldark in 1996. The briefer time frame does not seem to hurt these two Prime Suspect stories as they can do without the leisurely kind of realism the Poldark and other naturalistic books require, but we do get less development of the characters and events are sprung on us where the film-makers rely on the actor’s ability to persuade us this new inner self we didn’t see before was there all along.

Lost Child brings together pederasty and also motherhood — quite a combination. What happened is this: a child, little girl, seems to have been kidnapped from Susan Covington (Beaty Ednie) a mother who has continued to cherish the child just as much as she did before its father John Warwick (played by Adian Lukis wonderfully well – the Wickham archetype fits here) deserted them to have liaisons with more than one woman and moved North. A scene with Tennison shows him at first defiant and nonchalant, not denying he did it even if he lied and was nearby while the murder occurred: he spent the afternoon in bed with a woman who is engaged to marry someone else. Susan, the mother, is hysterical; she goes on TV begging for her child to be returned safely to her.

About half-way through for the first time I had begun to feel that in a way these series could pander to the bigoted paranoia of people, especially surrounding sexual experience vis-a-vis children. The suspect is someone she has also filmed in the park; her film and identification points to Chris Hughes (John Glenister) who served 14 years for molesting minors. I was troubled by the harshness of the response to Chris; I hasten to say I have no agenda for child molesters, only that Hughes was treated so brutally: one of the police officers, Jack Ellis (Tony Muddyman) beats Chris savagely upon trying to arrest him when Chris (understandably) tries to flee the ferocity of this bunch. Jane Tennison is as ferocious and will not listen to any alibis of Chris, especially since she finds he still indulges in saving photos of girls in albums. She is throughout dressed severely; in 3 she was homeliness and clutzyness itself; here she is repeatedly in tight cut black suits, her hair severe, knife-like puritanical elegance:

We are led to suspect Chris just as much by Chris’s relationship to his wife/partner Anne Sutherland (Lesley Sharpe). They seem not be be getting along. Ann seems to be hiding something; she falsified an alibi; Chris over-reacts to situations we see; he is sensitive man who has suffered a long time, was abused in prison because he was a pederast. He insists too strongly he’s fine now. Well, he’s not altogether; they have troubled sex. He saves pornographic magazines in a drawer.

The story seems to culminate in the police trying to wrest Chris/Glenister from his house where he is holed up and taking Anne and their two children, girls both, hostage. The police promise not to have snipers, but they lie and start to shoot; hysterical, he grabs a child and returns to the house.

Now here is where I saw I was wrong and the film was slowly leading us to see that even pederasts should not be pre-judged; they can change, reform; they deserve understanding, sympathy. Suddenly and without preparation to explain why we are led to think that after all Christ didn’t do it beyond that a psychiatrist, Dr Patrick Schofield (played by Stuart Wilson) says adamently in his view Chris/Glenister could not have done it. Somehow when Chris is chased down by the police Susan loses it. She goes hysterical in a new way when she sees Chris and his wife’s children. A long soliloquy brings out slowly how tired she had become of her daughter,, how relentless her life with her (from job to child care, to job again), how the girl irritated her by screaming, screaming, screaming, endless demands, never ceasing, never giving her a moment to herself.

The murderer was Susan. The mother suffocated the daughter. She was (we are to see) given no help and had herself to come up with the baby-sitting money. The roar of anger and distress that comes from her is stunning.

The show is about how insanely we react to child molester (who to be sure, those who are, can do awful things; that they are or can be suffering people too. But it’s also about how motherhood is experienced in our society and its phoninesss and pretenses (which Susan inveighs against in the long closing near soliloquy Tennison and her aide, Sgt [police officers) Chris Cromwell (played by Sophie Stanton) rejoins the show (she was in Episode 1 as Jane’s sidekick) and its hardships. What it asks of a woman.

The frame is important. It’s a “termination” — as it opens Jane has an abortion, a left-over from her love affair with an older lover, now married, was part of Prime Suspect 3. Jane is roaring mad at the death of this child because she has lost her own. The title refers to her abortion as well as the loss of Susan’s child.

I know audience members could be strengthened in their opposition to abortion and say, see how over-reacting made Jane blame Chris, and also liken Jane to Susan as two murderers. But that would be entirely false to the feeling of the series. Jane had a hard time getting time off enough for the “termination” — it’s called, and the child would get badly in the way of her career. This does not mean she does not feel bad too, at some level identify with Susan, not as a murderer but as someone in the grip of unfair choices There is too much sacrifice required of women as mothers.

It did need to be longer. We did not learn enough about Jack Warwick’s and Susan’s relationship nor Chris/Anne Sunderland’s. Susan’s confession was sprung too quickly. Still that Chris/Glenister’s innocence is sprung on us works very well. He is never idealized and on the surface could have been prosecuted, even found guilty. No sentimental ideals are pushed before us and a lot of cruel mindless over-reaction. The ambiguities made me think of James’s Turn of the Screw often read (wrongly) misogynistically.

Another effect of cutting the time for the story in the fourth season was indeed to focus on Mirren. She became a continual presence. The film-makers decided to marginalize the other police officers because they didn’t have time to cover them all. IN the next story she was made the focus deliberately.

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Jane (Mirren) and Patrick (Wilson) talking, she intently, he companionably (Scent of Darkness)

The Scent of Darkness

I did have trouble understanding it; that is to say, I couldn’t upon my first watching figure out how the murderer or quite why the murderer did what he did because so much was elliptical and just piled in. It was like watching a story meant to be 3 hours or 4 done in a couple of hours and 20 minutes.

Scent of Darkness had a different script writer, director, and producer: suddenly it all men; Lydna La Plante gone, Sally Head gone. But it was as strongly feminist as ever. By happenstance over on WMST-l the women were talking of how feminists are endlessly accused of being prigs and not have a sense of humor when the case is what’s said to be funny is really not funny to its victims (women in general) and helping to find books which showed this. Scent of Darkness opens with Tennison angry because a woman she wants promoted is not being promoted. The panel in front of her says that’s because this woman is not a team-player, doesn’t get along. Tennison asks for proof? “She has no sense of humor.”

Right.

But I also liked it and was eager to re-watch. I especially (I admit) liked the focus on Jane and giving her an on-going private life and relationship with the psychiatrist she had begun to like and trust in Lost Child: Stuart Wilson as Jane’s boyfriend and the relationship that was suggested. It appealed, and he as an older man (he was Ferdinand Lopez in Pallisers, and in Jewel in the Crown, the shit who impregnates Sarah and she knows better than to want to marry so by her mother and aunt is driven to have an abortion) who is amoral/immoral made empathetic by giving him kindness and acceptance and tolerance if not a will to commit.

Well, my second watching made the program not only make sense but showed the implicitly feminist scene that opened the program was the clue or twig developed for the rest. In addition, for the first time Jane Tennison was slightly more central than the murder story; hitherto her story has been parallel, going alongside sometimes, almost equal in the first program but not the center as it was here.

Basically it’s a reprise of Story or Season 1. Instead of Sergeant Otley trying to get rid of Jane, we have the chief detective in charge who makes the comment, “she had no sense of humor” to Tennison: David Thorndike (played by Stephen Boxer): Thorndike is intensely motivated to destroy Tennison’s career and not quite consciously decides that the two new murders of the first mini-series were not done by the man who Jane put in prison.
In other words, she was responsible for a tremendous miscarriage of justice then. He uses a book that has been published by someone whom George Marlowe fools.

So we have to return to the story matter and central theme of malicious brutal violence against women. What emerges is his time the real murderer is the jailor of Marlowe: there is a problem of probability here — perhaps why I didn’t get what was happening. The idea that jailor seems subject to Marlowe and is acting out Marlowe’s violence doesn’t quite wash, but this allows for Jane having to resolve an old case and return to its issues.

A problem this film had too was this time not all the actors returned. Richard Hawley has been in all the series and he was used centrally as someone loyal to her and that helped bind the films.

DI Richard Haskons (Richard Hawley)

Together they break a code, though since the case is hers, she is repeatedly hauled over the coals in public, reprimanded, taken off the case finally (when she insists she was right in the first place) and at last just about fired. So the humiliations of women a member of WWTTA said are so typical of women’s films are here in spades — but with a twist. We see the way she is made to kowtow, plead for herself, admit error are not only unfair, but shown to be wrong and partly the result of the misogynistic Thorndike. She she wins in the end because silently the intelligent and decent people (John Benfield as her superior, DCS Michael Kernan) are on her side. The very top man is just and lucid.

What I loved best was the slow development of her relationship with Stuart Wilson as Patrick Schofield — from missing a movie they neither of them wanted to see, to taking a bath together while they drink and smoke, to watching TV, to sleeping together, getting up in the morning. It really felt real this, though again we had to strain at the improbability that Patrick, a man who seems so ontologically on her side, would allow himself to interview and half countenance the author of the book who wrote the book saying Jane was wrong. This leads to Jane suspecting Patrick is betraying her and gives rise to powerful scenes of conflicting emotions (in this viewer too) as we watch them seem to break apart. They don’t.

This is one of the stories that has a happy-ish ending, not group exultation this time but Jane asking Thorndike to dance and then sneering at him before she returns to Patrick’s table. Very human.

Not that the violence against women is at all marginalized or the way Jane is almost fired and humiliated for good. I can’t say in real life she would have been fired, for in real life none of this would have happened in this way at all. It’s fairy tale this one, more so than the previous.

A kiss

Maybe it’s the men doing it made a love story and powerful or empowered woman (they would believe that) so central. Mirren was here more central than the previous 5 stories, only I do think without Stuart Wilson the depths of feeling at moments would not have been there. This too is part of a woman’s life and in this story Mirren could carry off having happiness in private as well as success in public.

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She (Emma Thompson) in Song of Lunch

I want to compare Mirren to Emma Thompson as archetypes. I watched the powerful Song of Lunch two nights ago and it has rightly been given favorable reviews: this one retells the story and slowly developing ironic poetic perspective. The film is an adaptation of a poem by Christopher Reid.

At first I loved it, then by the end I found myself angered by one of the two opposing themes or messages that were conveyed: the one where we are to despise the misery of “he” (Alan Rickman) as brought on by himself.

He (Alan Rickman)

I know you can take it the opposing way, but only by watching a good deal of the movie against the grain. In the movie Thompson plays an archetype she often does — not acknowledged. The headmistress, her teeth a kind of vagina dentata. she was that in spades in An Education. A part of this comes out in her as Elinor Dashwood, dry lone unmarried possible old maid. Here it grated strongly because she was not a victim (as in Wit) and was so sleek and well-adjusted, such a winner with her successful novelist husband, beautiful flat, life, daughters. Maybe Rickman was self-absorbed, narcissistic, felt sorry for himself, spoiled the lunch by his morbid behavior, but he was genuine and his faults preferable to her self-complacency, conventional success, coolness.

I suppose Reid maybe did hate “she” but the film makers made “she” our norm that is good not ambiguous, not cold, not the result of luck. In Mirren’s series we see the common fates of women.

So for me I much prefer the drunken, half-incompetent, often wretched (behind the scenes they fight and spoil things for one another) Wilson-Mirren archetype to this of Thompson, with what she demands of Rickman and he can’t come up to. I’m saying that at heart I find after all I’m preferring Mirren’s archetypal iconography fully than Thompson’s as developed by films with their pro-social, pro-conventional moral turns. Helen Mirren’s films have taught me something that I had not realized was part of Emma Thompson’s.

Lastly: the film adaptation of LeCarre’s Tinker Tailor (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982)

Smiley (Alec Guiness) and Peter Guillam (Michael Jayston)

I have been struck with how LeCarre through Hopcraft (Tinker Tailor) or Hopkins (Smiley’s People) is an inverse presentation of Lynda Plante’s perspective, or perhaps I should say she has reversed LeCarre’s. LeCarre is a rare male writer not to be a misogynist finally or anti-feminist. He is often deeply sympathetic to his heroines, makes them strong, independent, complicated. Not marginalized. Yet not central. As adapted into films, they are victims in the sense of LaPlante: the world stacked against them, men murderous. In Tinker Tailor by episode 3 one young woman who gets involved with the circus (spies) has been abducted, probably raped, tortured, killed. We never see her but the experience Ricki Tarr (Hywell Bennett drop dead beautiful in the Anthony Andrews mould) has galvanizes himself into action to expose the “mole.” We see Smiley (Alec Guiness) visit an old girlfriend, now retired from the circus because she found out too much and her hands are twisted from torture; she is clearly as old as she is utterly available. She is left with an old dog for company, “safe” in Oxford – lovely street off a fine park. The eldely actress reminded me of Dorothy Tutin. In Smiley’s People we have an older woman (Eileen Atkins) who has lived a desolate life separated from her daughter as the underlying motivating story. The same holds true of Meirelles Constant Gardener

Both Smiley and Wilson are presented as protective tender man (reminding me of Robin Ellis as Poldark in some of his behaviors to towards his two beloved women). Plante took their women and made them center repeatedly, made us see the torture, the rape, their desperate lives. The mode, the action, the implications, and the larger political issues are then feminized.

Ellen