To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive — RL Stevenson: a blog on books, films, art, music, culture
Marion Halcombe (Jessie Buckley) and Laura Fairlie (Olivia Vinall) hugging for dear life (2018 Woman in White) — a double self
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve written a blog on the difficulty of adapting Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Woman in White, into a modern movie, and shared my syllabus for this just past summer course on Sensation and Gothic Novels, Then and Now, to wit, Collins’s The Woman in White, and Valerie Martin’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I’ve taught myself an enormous amount (compared to what I knew say when I wrote my last blog about the difficulty of filming Collins’s novels), and was exhilarated, riveted, and fascinated by Collins’s book. The people in my class seemed very interested, all who came were doing the reading (plus they all read Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde) and liked the two movies I screened (2018 Woman in White, Fiona Seres, 1996 Mary Reilly, Stephen Frears [and Roman Polanski’s script altered]), and I told them about the revealing updating in the 1997 Woman in White, Pirie and Fywell).
Now often when I finish reading and teaching a brilliant book, I write an essay-blog on it here (or Austen reveries); in this case I decided, the better contribution to an understanding of this book would be to share the calendar I constructed for the book while I was reading it I will also share the Table of Contents I made, which we used to anchor class discussions.
One of the books I read in for the course is Jenny Bourne Taylor’s In the Secret Theater of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth Century Psychology where Taylor argued that the striking sense of many-layered personalities impinging on one another that the novel conveys derives from its subjective narrative devices, of which they are many. Woman in White is very like Richardson’s Clarissa, an epistolary narrative: what Taylor implies is the deeply subjective, violent, nightmarish, and whatever other dreams erupt from our reading these juxtaposed journals. Taylor is anxious to show us how psychologically and socially insightful are these patterns of human behavior.
At the same time I became aware that Anthony Trollope’s famous mockery of Collins’s method in Trollope’s Autobiography was not an exaggeration. Trollope had been correct to say that Collins “constructed” everything in his novel “down to the minutest detail” so that different parts of the story adhere consistently to a calendar and can be plotted or dovetailed consistently across the book. And it does really matter if something “happened at exactly half-past two o’clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen miles before the fourth milestone.” If Laura Fairlie was seen alive in London after she was declared dead, then there’s proof she still exists, and the tombstone lies.
But while both recent editors and an editor from the 1970s discuss the dating of the characters’ journals in the novel, none of them actually sketched the calendar out itself. That’s what I’ve done. It is, alas, too long for a single or even double blog, and since Jim’s death, I can no longer add documents to my website, so I put the calendar itself on academia.edu, and am writing this blog to alert the fan-lover-reader of Wilkie Collins’s book (and any scholar who may find it of use) that it’s up there. My hope is people wanting to understand the book will find uses for this calendar the way many readers have my calendars for Jane Austen’s novels.
Although I was forced to label this analysis of the underlying patterns of the novel a “draft,” it is not. Nor is it a published paper, nor a paper for an academic conference, but a working document, a document to work with as you read and study and write about Wilkie Collins
Curiouser and curiouser, I noticed that all three of my editions of The Woman in White, the 1999 Oxford, ed John Sutherland, the 1999 Penguin, ed Matthew Sweet, and an older 1974 Penguin, ed Julian Symons lacked a table of contents! Well I can supply that in this blog too:
An outline of The Woman in White, using the Oxford World Classics, ed Sutherland 1998/9; and then Penguin, ed Matthew Sweet 1999 (in parentheses)
Preface to present edition p 3-4 (p 6) (Sweet edition has 1860 preface, pp 3-5 too)
1 Walter Hartright, pp 5-127 (pp 9-126)
Subdivisions
Anne Catherick’s warning letter, pp 78-79 (pp 79-80)
Mr Fairlie’s letter of dismissal, pp 110-11 (pp 110-11)
2 Vincent Gilmore, lawyer, pp 127-62 (pp 127-62)
3 Marion Halcombe, pp 163-97 (pp 163-95)
Subdivision
Hartright’s farewell letter, on way to Central America, burnt by Marion pp 185-86 (p 183)
Second Epoch, p 198
1 Marion Halcombe (Cont’d), June 11,1850, pp 198-343 (pp 196-335)
Subdivision
William Kylie’s letter, which Marion destroys, Oxford pp 273-74 (Penguin pp 268-69)
Visions of Walter Hartright – 4, ruined temple, forest, stranded ship, a tomb & veiled woman Oxford Sutherland pp 278-79 (Penguin pp 273-74)
AC’s letter: she has been seen AC’s letter: she has been seen Oxford Sutherland 303 Penguin p 297
2 Count Fosco, pp 343-44 (pp 336-38) – Postscript to Marion
3 Frederick Fairlie, pp 345-64 (pp 338-56)
4 Eliza Michelson, Housekeeper at Blackwater Park, pp 364-407 (pp 357-98)
Subdivision: Fairlie’s note now produced Sutherland p 392 (Penguin 383)
Several Sort of Narratives
5 Hester Pinhorn, Fosco’s cook, pp 407-13 (Ann Catherick’s death as Lady Glyde’s) (pp 399-404)
6 Doctor’s certificate, p 413 (p 404)
7 Jane Gould (prepared corpse), p 414 (p 405)
8 The Tombstone, p 414 (p 405)
9 Walter Hartright (Cont’d), pp 414-19 (406-11)
Third Epoch
1 Walter Hartright (Cont’d), pp 420-540 (pp 412-528)
Subdivisions
Marion Halcombe’s story, pp 422-39 (pp 417-30)
From Count Fosco’s letter telling of how Anne Catherick in asylum claims to be Lady Glyde p 425 (416-17)
Mrs Vesey’s letter p 445 ( p 436)
Fosco’s threatening letter, pp 457-58 (447-48)
On my TrollopeandHisContemporaries listserv at groups.io, we are planning to read Collins’s No Name this coming winter; I am now listening to The Moonstone read aloud by Peter Jeffreys (brilliant) and have added Collins to my list of authors to be read, and reread and studied, and read about. I did love his Rambles Beyond Railways the first time I read it: he goes round about and meditating what he sees and hears in Cornwall. I recommend Catherine Peter’s biography of Collins (see review by Jim Kincaid) and Taylor’s Cambridge Companion
John-Alexander Sakelos as Peter Quince, Jacob Ming-Trent as Bottom, John Floyd as Flute, Sabrina Lynn Sawyer as Snug
Friends and readers,
The summer is more than half over and I’ve not recommended any summer movies. I have urged as a perfect summer book the treat of an ironic romance, shadowing the gothic at its edges off-stage of Valerie Martin’s Italian Fever, and tonight add (in haste, lest you miss it) the unmeaning (in the best sense) broad farcical fun at the National Building Museum of a Folger production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. A high compliment I can pay it is I felt at moments like I was back in New York City in the Central Park theater watching a Shakespeare play, for this MND like to many Central Park Shakespeare plays was doused in a feeling of local culture (African-American city style) and sentiment (here DC). How happy those nights were for me in the 1970s in NYC under the stars. This one had a little of that wondrous starlight at moments, and was also (not unrelated) a community event:
Danaya Esperanza as Puck at the top; Rotimi Aghablaka and Nubia M Monks as Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta on top; the four lovers on either side
I agree with Peter Marks it’s another savagely cut-down Shakespeare, and was done very broadly (precious little nuance was felt, so no sense of intimacy). Still, those central moments for the lovers in the forest, the players’ practicing and production, with the frame of Theseus/Hippolyta as Oberon/Titania(only it is he who falls in love with an ass) was enough. The best lines survived and then some.
Peter Marks omitted what was the fun: filled in was a lot of African-American and recent rock music, Jacob Ming-Trent mimicked a lot of African-American slang phrases and pop culture allusion as well as the culture itself (this Bottom rode an invisible motorcycle) as did the players to some extent and the framing of the noble and squabbling faery lover. Our Athenian pairs were left to be their usual selves. The dance and music performed by everyone immersed us. The faeries’ outfits were magical fantastical:
The same actors played the players as the faeries
I liked some of the costumes as outlandish bizzare: for example, Snug as Thisbe in the play
The red wigged braided hair is Thisbe; the other extravagant lady is Helena (Renea S. Brown)
I suggest that you do not expect a lot of serious philosophic feeling about dreams and/or love despite what is interestingly (in the program notes for the production) claimed by Michele Osterow; what we are given rather is elusiveness and self-conscious self-reflexive ironic highjinks, e.g., Lilli Hokama as Hermia may be little but she is fierce, and tosses Hunter Ringsmith up to the sky. My favorite moments came with Kathryn Zoerb as Moon and Brit Herring as Wall (for whom, alas, I can find no photos). The director was Victor Malana Maog; Alexandra Beller, choreographer; and Tony Cisek (long time Folger person) did the production design.
When I could still see to drive at night and could come to night-time productions, pre-pandemic at the Folger itself, they had another of these Midsummer Night’s Dreams, this one a movie with more sweet sadness and melancholy, elements missing here. But we are (I am) aging and in this at-risk-world of ours, don’t miss out on this gaiety (however vigorous — think robust).
The stage and auditorium as a whole set up in a playhouse space:
Behind the scenes pre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream stage play.
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age – the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night – are not solved; as long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”
Victor Hugo, preface to Les Misérables (Hauteville House, 1862)
Dear friends and reader,
As I started to read it, the text seems to me utterly contemporary and referring itself to what is all around us today; a book again
for our time … I became so excited with the beauty of the prose and the incisive suggestively rich allegorical underpinnings …
I’m hope I am not giving an impression that I spend my life making schedules for reading with other people: this the sixth such calendar I’ve put on this blog this year. In four cases they were part of syllabi for classes I teach (this year all online) but in two they are schedules for me and several other people (thus far we have 7) to read together over several weeks (here months) on a listserv. I put this one on because most unexpectedly when I shared a previous schedule for this book with two FB pages I found a couple of people joined the listservs where we are reading them, and more people were planning to read along than I thought would. It is a famous book, many movies, a stupendously successful musical, many editions, many translations, and a full secondary literature.
I then discovered I had been far too optimistic or naive about quite how long Victor Hugo’s profound masterpiece is. In the 2013 Deluxe Penguin edition I am reading the text in it’s 1416 pages, including notes bit excluding the introduction. So I revised it, and will now put it here and the URL to this blog in those two places as an amendment. I am also inviting people to join us this way. Go to:
The novel is divided into 5 books, corresponding (as David Bellos shows in his wonderfully lucid nformative and enjoyable book on Les Miserables as The Novel of the Century) to five stories or narratives, the first three centered more or less on three of the major characters: 1) Fantine; 2) her daughter, Cosette; 3) the young man who falls in love with Cosette, Marius; 5) and our hero whose lifeline is the general backbone of the book, Jean Valjean. 4 appears to be centered on the rebellion that occurs in the novel in Paris, which all our still living major characters, even Javert, the police guard who goes in pursuit of Valjean, take part in. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 5 are 8 to 9 books each, with Part 4, 15 books.
I will be reading the recent Penguin translated by Christine Donougher (used by Bellos, recommended by him) and have followed the numbers I found there but also have the older Penguin Norman Denny (where two chapters said to be straight history are placed in the back of the book). This time I do not have the text in French (as I did when on these same listservs we read Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris).
For the week beginning Sunday,
Oct 3: Part 1, Bks 1-2
Oct 10, Part 1, Bks 3-5
Oct 17, Part 1, Bks 6-8
Oct 24, Part 2, Bks 1-3
Oct 31, Part 2, Bks 4-6
Nov 7, Part 2, Bks 7-8
Nov 14, Part 3, Bks 1-3
Nov 21, Part 3, Bks 4-6
Nov 28, Part 3, Bks 7-8
Dec 5, Part 4, Bks 1-3
Dec 12, Part 4, Bks 4-6
Dec 19 Part 4, Bks 7-9
Dec 26 Part 4, Bks 10-12
Jan 2, Part 4: Bks 13-15
Jan 9, Part 5, Bks 1-3
Jan 16, Part 5, Bks 4-6
Jan 23, Part 5, Bks 7-9
So we finish just as February is rolling round …
As you can see we’ve started already but we will take a longer time over the first Part (Fantine) to give people a chance to join in, get the book and catch up, become (we hope) immersed.
Harriet Walter reading aloud poetry (so did Tobias Menzies) from Simon Schama’s The Romantics and US: the third part includes an impressive meditation on Hugo
Translations and editions. For what it’s worth, here is an article about the merits and flaws of several central translations. The Wilbour translation is contemporary with Hugo, and the Isabel Hapgood is another good 19th century text (with pictures), but Hugo sanctioned and gave advice on a translation by Sir Lascelles Wraxall, which is online at Gutenberg. If you go to Part 1, Fantine, that will take you to the later books. Hugo’s original French is also online at Gutenberg: you begin with Part 1, Fantine. There is a venerable Everyman whose translator is not named. Here is my old Denny, quite lively English, with a good introduction. And the latest, an award winner by the highly praised Julie Rose for Modern Library
Group photo of actors in 2018/29 Les Miserables
Movies galore: I’ve watched several and think nothing competes with the most recent, however too short, by Andrew Davies, 2018/19: Dominic West, David Oyelowo, Adeel Akhtar; Lily Collins, Olivia Coleman; Ron Cook. Dir: BBC/Masterpiece. I’ve never seen a more terrifying poignant depiction, Lily Collins astonishing, unforgettable, without hair, without teeth, laughed at, spurned and finally dying without retrieving her child in time.
The musical needs no description here. Here is a blog where they read Les Miserables one chapter a day and compared the movies (it includes clips).
Signature theater production in Arlington (my husband, Jim, loved this one and wrote a now lost blog on it)
The Householder (1963): husband, Prem (Shashi Kapoor) and wife, Indu (Leela Naidu) not getting along
Shakespeare Wallah (1965): daughter Lizzie (Felicity Kendall) and mother Carla Buckingham (Laura Liddell, Felicity’s real mother) playing Shakespeare
Roseland (1977): a few of the chief presences sitting around one of many tables just outside the dance floor
Heat and Dust (1983): chief characters: Nawab (Shashi Kapoor) and his kept man, Harry (Nickolas Grace) and the English Official’s Wife, Olivia (Gretta Scacchi) out for a picnic
Friends and readers,
Over the course of my life, I’ve seen at least 16 of some 40 films (and some several times) made by the whole M-I-J team or two of the three over half a century. A few are bound up with memories that matter: going out to the cinema one summer’s day with Thao, a young woman I am motherly towards, and Izzy and seeing the Chekhovian The City of Your Final Destination (2009, so very late, after Merchant’s death); one night very late, Jim asleep, I burst into hysterical tears at the sense of a life thrown away, in The Remains of the Day (1993) and rushed into a room in the front of the house so as not to awaken Jim; during our trip into Quebec one summer, about (I thought at the time) retreat, Heat and Dust (1983), and now I’ll remember Shakespeare Wallah (1965), studying, trying to understand the work of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for a course I’m about to teach, and feelings about England deeply awakened by the poignancy of the characters having to leave India to go home …
While they are quite varied, I’d say at the core what makes them so often so compelling, so memorable is the true feeling caught or theatricalized in their actually usually quietly understated films; themes like memory, inexplicable longings, an undercurrent of melancholy. Film stories carefully developed, so the hidden life of social scenes is revealed before us. I didn’t chose the most striking shots from the many many brilliant actors who have performed for them, some of them almost unrecognizable by the time they were swept up into the film world (especially once Maggie Smith transformed) though the shots released to the public bring out the actor from the part to sell the picture:
A young Shashi Kapoor as Prem, the intensely frustrated, repressed (before his mother) and occasionally distraught husband in The Householder
Julie Christie as Anne supposed independent young woman come to India to research the life and places her great-aunt Olivia ended up in India in Heat and Dust
Ismail Merchant in one of the many short films he made with Ivory abut their work, and now to be found (if you are lucky), as features in re-digitalized DVDs, said what differentiated their work was they all worked with “heart, intelligence, art.” They were earnest as well as playful about their trade (Wallah can be translates into a trade). I find in their best moments, they approach the work of Ingmar Bergmann; there are also many fallings away, as they stumble, try for non-cinematic almost non-dramatic material (Roseland), attempt to please an audience with simply lush photography (The Bostonians). There is a love affair with the English southern countryside, though three continents, three cultures are their groundwork: India first (Southasia), then England (and Anglo places wherever found), then NYC (very late South America) and Italy (Europe). They could take a photograph: in their very first movies, The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah, they had the direct help of Satyajit Ray and his cinematographer from whom they learned much about cutting, editing. I feel they were drawn to the misty and intangible currents emanating from characters to one another
Felicity Kendall, the wandering half-broke troupe’s daughter, and Shashi Kapoor, the young Indian aristocrat in Shakespeare Wallah
Daniel Day Lewis as Cecil Vyse and Helen Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch in Room with a View (1985)
I have vowed to make these blogs shorter and so readable; my aim here is to encourage the reader (and watcher) to watch the earlier films (1962-83), perhaps in the black-and-white versions off-putting at first (little is compromised, they are not bland)go to Amazon prime or YouTube (where many are to be found), rent one of the older DVDs from Netflix (or better yet, splurge and buy a newly re-digitalized version with features as long as the movie), so perhaps the best thing, swiftest is to make a picture worth a thousand words by linking in the whole of Householder from YouTube
The Householder is a close adaptation of Jhabvala’s apparently fourth novel (in books on her The Householder is said to be her first). Now I realize it has in embryo central motifs and types of characters she has throughout her fiction, from beginning (all India) to middle (English women drawn into India and their original personality destroyed by the experience) to end (cool stories of corrupt individuals exploiting vulnerable ones across the Indian/American divide), — you can see a parallel plot in way (putting aside too literal alignments) in Heat and Dust (which I chose as the end of the early films as it was their first true hit, and ever after they were too often tempted into cream and enigmatic evasion).
The Householder is also a utterly believable story of two young Indian people put into an arranged marriage, and then left to make it on their own with the husband, Prem, having a low level job as teacher on a small salary. One of the aspects of all Jhabvala’s novels is that as we begin (and in many of her novels this does not change) in pairs of characters supposed to spend their lives together at least one, sometimes both have no concern or love for one another, are not congenial and what’s more don’t expect to be (particularly true here). Prem is having a very hard time adjusting to teaching in a crude place with no help from colleagues, no education in education, students absolutely w/o any real motivation to learn what he’s teaching (a dialect of Sanskrit); Indu (Leela Naidu, also an actress in France) is given nothing to do, no one to be with, her only function to serve him and he’s gone all day. One of his big mistakes is to bring his mother to live with them — a greedy, self-centered woman, rather stupid. The wife flees back to her parents and what she remembers as a happy household of sisters when she discovers she is pregnant. It’s this period away that awakens our hero to his need of her and desire to be a successful husband (householder). Amanda Vickery did a three part series on men in the 18th century and one of hours was how men wanted and needed to marry to belong, to have status, to be seen as successful males. So often 18th century England resembles 20th century India.
There are remarkable scenes of fights between teachers, of his attempt to get a rise in salary and get his rent put down, a friendship with a young man very like himself, but having an easier time adjusting to what the society has given him as his fate. We are shown that marriage is no picnic at all — The Namesake of Jumpha Lahiri (a writer whose franker work teaches you much about Jhabvala’s) is an idealized depiction — in Jhabvala these males are just so rude and commanding to the imprisoned females whose feeble weapon is to strike back by being awful in conversation. Prem gets involved with very ego centered Americans who have come to India to escape to some sublime nirvana (as does Anne in Heat and Dust) and we meet both sincere gurus and crooks. This is a sketch of the kinds of people and social interactions which matter which she repeatedly, almost obsessively develops at length in her later stories. I hope women today in India in some classes are offered far more in life for real individual fulfillment.
A Daphnis and Chloe archetype underlies this story, for at its end we are asked to believe they are making a happy adjustment at last
Returning home together on the train
I’ve not got a video of the whole Shakespeare Wallah for free online, but I can supply some remarkable reviews, from the New York Times archive; in The Guardian, the professional Chris Weigand approaches with concision some adequacy on the film’s complicated arts: Bollywood and the Bard
In his Guardian obituary for Geoffrey Kendal in 1998, Ivory wrote about the tensions during the production with the veteran actor (Geoffrey Kendal): “He let me know how he despised the cinema – that the cinema was his enemy, causing theatres to be empty and tours to be cancelled.” But Kendal – who has an ease in front of the camera despite his lack of film experience – came to recognize that thanks to Ivory “it was the despised cinema that told the world of my existence and to a certain extent of my fight”.
Geoffrey Kendal doubting the value of what he has spent his life so beautifully on
And the despised cinema is here undeniably beautiful. Shot in black and white (for budgetary reasons) by Subrata Mitra, the film has a stately pace, is sensitively written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and comes with music by the esteemed director Satyajit Ray. The bumpy travels of theatre troupes often make for bittersweet comic escapades
And now my words:
A wandering troupe of actors have made a living traveling around parts of India doing Shakespeare and other classics (as the film opens we see a Sheridan play in progress before a mass group of boys in suits — white, Indian and one Black).
In 18th century costume performing on a bike
But they find they are no longer wanted in the same numbers or way. Gigs dwindle: the local places would rather Sanskrit poetry; the British schools are closing; they are paid much less. We see their truck break down on the road. They are aging, one man dies. The Gleneagles Hotel (pitch perfect that Scots name) that used to accommodate them – very British – is closing. Felicity Kendall is not comic in this and she is not thin — no need to be near anorexic in the 1960s. She and Sanju, an Indian man who rescues them on the road fall in love ad who has as his mistress, Manjula, a Bollywood star who performs one of their sexualized songs, Madhur Jaffrey (she is the Begum in Heat and Dust).
Manjula performing a Bollywood song and dance for Sanju
The poignant question is, Can They Stay On?
Exhausted, on the road, rainy, hot ….
So this is a version of Paul Scott’s famous masterpiece, Staying On, a story retold by Olivia Manning in The Rain Forest (franker and nowhere as well know, and yet more visionary, acerbic, yet in Manning our hero and heroine after some scarifying ordeals escape back; in Scott’s the man dies and we leave our heroine in a desperate situation, just holding on in a beauty shop and hostile hotel. They and this are all autobiographical: the Kendalls did live this way and in one of the features, a mature Felicity tells us at first her father was disappointed with the film as it did not show their triumphs, the fantastical fun they had living the way they did, it too emphasized the ending and sense of loss
We see several famous scenes from Shakespeare done very well in what seems an old-fashioned 19th century way (disrupted now).
Saying goodbye; her parents know it’s best for Lizzie to return to an aunt in the UK; they will follow when they find they must — now they will go round just doing “gems from Shakespeare”. The way it is discussed off-hand by ordinary people suggests a rollicking comedy (!), but while it does not end tragically and there are very comic moments, it is a melancholy and oddly realistic film.
It’s very realistic in the sense that we get feel for India. Jhabvala is the author of the script which while not as subtle as her later ones is very good — no book behind it. I am slowly beginning to appreciate her stories for the very first time ever –understanding her better and being older less emotionally involved, more distant myself.
These two films are a pair.
*****************************************
Roseland, the place and marquee
The dancefloor
I would call Roseland one of the team’s noble failures. They actually filmed in the real Roseland theater, and with some professional actors, used the aging and ordinary people dancing of an evening: the idea seems to have been to concentrate on the dancing itself, with the stories barely sketched and the repetitive obsessions of those who come to such places regularly emphasized. It has its moments (Geraldine Chaplin of the professionals manages best); there are some professional dancers who catch our attention now and again, but it is fatally unrealized because it is trying to show us that the shell of these places is quite other than what is unexaminedly celebrated briefly in commercial films and histories.
This evening’s task is nearly done. I am passing over the effective The Europeans (1979): sorry to do this as it features a young Robin Ellis (also Lee Remnick — see just below) is a Henry James story, about clashing cultures, which is picked up later on, as just the sort of thing that M-I-J were particularly good at. Its themes differ from those of the other early films and the film anticipate other Henry James stories as well as several of the later, E.M. Forster stories — all set in England — or the US as The Europeans seems to be. It is not one of their best; they grew better at this type as they went on.
Heat and Dust has been if anything over-reviewed. Jhabvala’s novel had won the Booker Prize (so it sold fantastically well). Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian
After 37 years, Heat and Dust stands up as an intelligent, ambitious, substantial picture – with flaws but also intriguing aspects that were perhaps not sufficiently understood at the time. Is the movie’s love story a diversionary heterosexualisation of something else?
Anne after reading her aunt’s letters seems (mysteriously) taken by their content, next to her Chidananda allowed back in (he lives off her)
Yes, the Nawab is homosexual (the team also had real empathy for homosexual men), and the ending is not happiness; Olivia and now Anne turn out not to be free spirits but frustrated women who allow themselves to become the sexual partners, Anne, for example, as deluded as the successfully for a bit stubborn shaved American with his faux-Indian name, Chidananda (Charles McCaughan), and her landlord Inder Lal (Zaki Hussain, another less scrupulous Prem). She does not know who the father of her child is, and her retirement for help in the transformed building that Olivia ended her isolated life in as far from self-actualization as Olivia. The Nawab we have learned is a corrupt thug.
Bradshaw concentrates on the wonderful performances, and hidden meanings that leap out today, as well as the facile nature of the Anne parallel (just compare a real depiction of such a household, with the wife subject to epileptic fits, the mother-in-law supplying counterproductive punishing remedies). I want to add that what helped make people keep coming to the film after they satisfied an early Booker Prize enthusiasm, is the simplicity with which the stories is filmed — almost the hollowed out nature. Like The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah (and the quietly complex The Europeans), nothing is over-produced or over-emphatic at all, even if feel of the film’s images and music is so sensual — which gave our film-makers their nuggets for turning to a commercially successful second half (later M-I-J).
What people remember best — who saw it — is the parallel plot, exquisitely dove-tailed into the same places — Anne (Julie Christie) comes back to India to see the place her great-Aunt Olivia’s (Gretta Scacchi) life played out, to understand it better by inhabiting the living context – and we go back and forth between the 1920s elegant Raj (once again Shashi Kapoor) with its desperate people and high violence (not seen by us but heard about off-stage) and the 1970s in exactly same places in India. The parallels including both women getting pregnant by the India man closest by, only Olivia has an abortion and the disgrace leads her to desert her (boring) English husband, Douglas (Christopher Cazenove doing a serious job a la Leonard Woolf) for the alluring (to Olivia glamorous because strange) Raj — a retreat which deepens when he is said to visit her only 3 times a year — in deference to his mother, the Begum (Madhur Jaffrey from Householder now grown 20 years older), and then stop altogether. Like so many of the women in Jhabvala’s stories, Olivia is utterly alienated from all the women she meets, and some have good advice, try to support her. Anne is your liberated young woman, but supposed sensible, with her affair with her landlord (Inder Lal) emerging slowly. But unlike Olivia, she stops short of an abortion
Anne stops the woman in mid-performance
and is seen joyously retreating to a building now a hospice institution, hospital, where we last watched Olivia live her life playing the piano, until the very end when (it is hinted) Olivia ended in desperate poverty. It seems the Begum has won at long last
Jhabvala presents these Indian mothers-in-law as vengeful when given any power
We have the saturninely bitter-witty gay companion, kept and bullied the Raj — Harry (Nickolas Grace, young in the 1920s, and made up to be very ancient in the 1960s; Grace played this type too many times — Brideshead Revisited, Dance to Music of Time. He can convey no wisdom to Anne now grown old, back in England so safer and more comfortable, but storyless — we learn nothing of the inbetween time — it is story which thickens out characters in films.
The two take tea many years later, miraculously Anne has aged little
Maybe what was liked were the scenes of playful social activity, rituals done so quietly (not much gossip) and dinners at length, Anglophilic with the important qualification none of the white men or women show any understanding or sympathy for the people they are supposed to be governing, except maybe Douglas at his table in the heat trying to dispense justice.
Maybe it’s his stiff white shirt and tie that make Douglas (Christopher Casenove) so unappealing to Olivia (Gretta Scacchi)
But unlike the stories of her later career, Jhabvala is willing to grant her heroines a refuge with the implication they have accepted being women alone or subject to others.
I recognize the types and themes elsewhere in Anglo-Indian art (novels and films): people performing, a foolish American following gurus, who at the film’s end, somewhat unusually escapes relatively unscathed — like Lizzie, he is headed home to his aunt, in his case it seems almost a Kansas of Dorothy-like security and safety.
This is the paradigm for Adhaf Soueif’s Map of Love who gives the story post-colonial politics, with dollops of feminism, strong heroines in the past and present and the central heroine at book’s end her own person, bringing up a daughter, companion to her deceased husband’s elderly (kind and gentle) father in middle class Kensington.
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Early in the partnership
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s most central theme in her books (as also Jhumpa Lahiri) comes from her thoroughly post-colonial roots; born in Germany of a Polish father whose nuclear family were killed in German concentration camps (he later killed himself), brought up in England (she writes in English), studying literature, she married to an Indian Bengali man, spending 25 years in India (read “Myself in India”), and the last phase of her existence in New York City. She was a perfect fit for the Englishman James Ivory who had come to India, and Ismail Merchant. A major theme of her fiction — searching for, building an identity, which even people who stay put at first sometimes must do when the one nuclear family and community they live among seeks to impose an identity that violates their innermost nature which seeks actualization. This is the central theme of The Namesake (Lahiri also has a multiple identity now: Indian, English, US, and now Italian. It fits the Merchant-Ivory perspective as seen in the writing and interviews by and about them. She died in 2013.
Merchant appears to have personally been a secular man, but as an Indian born he grew up in a religiously-laden society, with opposing groups (Muslim, Hindi). In the online biography at wikipedia His father, a textile manufacturer, was the head of the Muslim League, and he refused to move to Pakistan at the time of independence and partition. “Family networks” enabled him at a young age to become friends with people influential and in the film industry. He studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and received BA degree of University of Bombay, moved to New York City where he worked as a messenger for the UN, and showed his talent for attracting funds from Indian delegates for film projects. He was the producer, the man who made the money come, and when he died, Ivory turned out not have the capacity to generate funds. He and Ivory had met in 1961 when he was in the US on a scholarship in a New York coffee shop; at the time Ivory was an Ivy Leaguer with aims to work in artful cinema. He died in 2005.
Ivory’s biography in wikipedia tells us he came from middling people in Oregon, where he first went to University; he moved to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where he directed the short film Four in the Morning (1953). He wrote, photographed, and produced Venice: Theme and Variations, a half-hour documentary submitted as his thesis film for his master’s degree in cinema. The film was named by The New York Times in 1957 as one of the ten best non-theatrical films of the year. He graduated from USC in 1957. Here we are told Ivory met producer Ismail Merchant at a screening of Ivory’s documentary The Sword and the Flute in New York City in 1959; they formed their company in 1961. He wrote and or collaborated with all four books on them as a team.
The three continual creative spirits grown older …
In Robert Emmet Long’s wonderful (full of wonders) and useful book, The Films of Merchant-Ivory:there are good biographies (much better than the ones I’ve provided), insightful details about stages in their careers, the gifts they showed, where learned their crafts, then descriptions and accounts of many of the films, many beautiful and thought-provoking photographs and stills. Long calls these three “unique uncommon individuals” who make “unique uncommon films.”
This too is an unusual blog or has become unusual. I’ve not for a long time advertised (in effect) one of the many group reads I participate in: I used to do this for those I lead on my listservs. We’ve been reading non-Trollope books on Trollope and His Contemporaries @ groups.io lately, books relatively unknown by women, colonialist and post-colonialist novels (Mary Taylor, Miss Miles, Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration from the North) and have come to read one of these by Trollope, and I’m hoping this relatively unknown but strong book will provoke interesting conversation. We read it once before on the list, but twenty years is a long time and the world has changed so that I feel we would come away concentrating on very different things than we did the first time round. Then we talked a lot about the sexual promiscuity and bigamy stories:
From modern illustrations by Francis Moseley in the Folio Society edition: John Caldigate glimpses Mrs Euphemia Smith for the first time aboard the ship going to Australia
Now I surmise we’d be a lot more interested in the cultural and social conflicts undergone and conflicts arising from these.
On Trollope-l (at the time the name) we read after JC after Is He Popenjoy? and The American Senator as three relatively unknown novels by Trollope. N John Hall says it is nonetheless among his best (!) — I’m not sure about that. In said Folio Society edition, R. C. Terry gives the novel high praise: he connects its matter to The Way We Live Now with its “evolving world of money, greed, and materialism in which ethical issues are becoming more urgent and difficult; it has a romantic myth of a young man who disappoints his father but wins out through high adventure, court-room scenes and stints in jail. There is much autobiographical resonance in the depiction of the estrangement and then coming together of the father and son.
From N. John Hall — in my own words: It has a number of chapters set either on board a ship bound for Australia or in Australia itself. Trollope had twice (1871 and 1875) journeyed to Australia to see his son, Fred, and had completed a long travel book about his time there, Australia and New Zealand (published 1873). It is one of several fictions set in Australia or on the way “out” & back to a colony (Harry Heathcote, “The Journey to Panama”, “Catherine Carmichael”, “Returning Home”). The toughness of the life presented, the frankness which which life is lived connects John Caldigate to Trollope’s Irish books as well as to other novels with romantic and adventuresome locales. The intransigent (and anti-sex) mother of the heroine, Mrs Bolton, recalls a similar female in Linda Tressel; the intolerance of everyone Nina Balatka. Although many of the novels’ chapters are set in England and explores English provincial life, particularly the narrowness of a provincial community, its lack of choices, what happens on board and in Australia initiates everything else, and we return to Australia in order insofar as this may be done vindicate the eponymous hero in the end.
It did help Trollope’s reputation. After several novels which were strongly criticized or didn’t sell very well (including The Prime Minister), this one was liked and sold, and reviewed favorably. Trollope hadn’t placed it quickly but when he had he got £1,200 from Chapman and Hall for exclusive book rights, and £600 from Blackwood’s for serial rights. It was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine from April 1878 to June 1879.
It connects back to Is He Popenjoy? (written October 1874 to May 1875) because it too is said to have been inspired by the Tichborne case: just about everyone who has written about it tells how Trollope wanted to call it Mrs John Caldigate or John Caldigate’s Wife because it focuses on bigamy, and has people turning up thousands of miles from where the hero thought he had left them forever in order to lay claim to an estate. The question is again legitimacy. It is also linked to Trollope’s Dr Wortle’s School (a novella written 8-9 April 1879) and to “sensation” novels like Ellen Wood’s East Lynne and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. There’s a dramatic trial, a disreputable past (clandestine sex is what happens), and some harsh emotional violence between a mother and daughter over her sexual and emotional allegiance to the man she calls her husband.
June 12, Chapters 1-8
June 19, Chapters 9-16
June 26, Chapters 17-24
July 3, Chapters 25-32
July 10, Chapters 33-40
July 17, Chapters 41-48
July 24, Chapters 49-54
July 31, Chapters 55-64
While there has been no film adaptation, there has been a graphic novel by Simon Grennan. It was announced, described, made available at the Leuven Trollope conference in 2015, and on one of my blog reports from the conference I reprinted one page of the pictures and one side of the endpapers — a beautiful depiction of a very gothic looking house, which I transfer here:
This could be either Caldigate’s father’s house or the Bolton’s — probably the Bolton’s, an imprisoning fearful emotionally violent place.
tt is a kind of unusual graphic novel because 1) the pictures are not close-ups; we are kept at a distance from the characters. And 2) there are few words — or far fewer than some of these graphic novels use when it comes to a serious “classic” 19th century novel. I don’t see a summary of the plot but I did read it and beyond omitting the comical post-office part of the novel at its ending), Grennan makes a couple of other modernizing changes. There are aborigines in the story
This is from my blog:
The team chose this novel as a less familiar one, one never adapted before. They cut the post office sections of the novel as they felt a graphic novel could not make these appealing Grennan decided he would try for pictures that projected what he thought were the aesthetic emphases of the novel. He wanted to visual equivocation, to keep readers and viewers at a distance from the characters in the way Trollope does: there would be no close-ups and even few middle distance shots and the point of view would be of a camera low-down. He was seeking a rhythmic roundtable of points of view; all the costumes reflect the way 19th century people of that decade dressed, the kinds of rooms they lived in. He did not want to use styles associated with classic comic; he wanted to capture this previous time as something strange. He developed a story of aborigines, practiced historical verisimilitude.
Grennan later told me he dressed Mrs Smith so she would have been recognizable in the era as a “Dolly Varden:” she is a character in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge whose coy highly-sexualized self-presentation (Dickens just salivates over her) was taken up by music hall performers — after all Mrs Smith has been and returns to the stage (though the reader never see her do this). (I admit I prefer to imagine Mrs Smith in her more somber outfits as a mature woman who confronts life and men frankly as their equal.) Simon chose dark deep rich colors (purples and browns) where-ever appropriate, and reserved yellows and golden browns and greens for suggesting seasons and landscapes. There is an French edition if anyone is interested, but be warned there are very few words.
So, come one, come all, you are not likely to find this book read by a group of people anywhere else this summer.
Telegraph Depot, Ninety Miles up the Roper River, Northern Territory,” Illustrated Sydney News, 31 August 1872
Hellman photographed next to her probably beloved typewriter
Jane Fonda in similar posture, as Julia (in the movie of the same name) typing her plays — calling to Hammett — an enjoyable moving film
Friends and readers,
It was in December 2013 that I wrote a blog here on Hellman’s four part memoir: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento (with Julia), Scoundrel Time and Maybe. My husband Jim had died two months earlier, and somehow I found this brave, stalwart, candid self-portrait of a genuinely strong woman, and its plain style strength of mind, integrity of behavior, with portraits of non-conformists (misfits, so-called), her own identification with these, was an appealing consolation. I was so foolish as to find in her portrait of Dashiell Hammett, my Jim, and in their life-long relationship a mirror of mine with Jim.
At the time I vowed to read the plays. Easier said than done. My inexpensive edition (1979 last reprint) has no notes, no annotations, and I found the psychological complexity of the characters and quite what they were doing on stage did not come across: I needed a narrator. I bought the biography by Alice Kessler-Harris, but tired of it as I have again as it is shaped by knee-jerk anti-communism when it comes to dealing with Lillian’s politics and political activity: K-H is perpetually apologizing for Hellman, and not conveying her beliefs. This time though I am teaching Hellman as a woman political writer of the 20th century, and the spur of standing (or sitting) in front of others (zoom on my computer) has pushed me into doing more work than that astute blog I wrote.
From Watch on the Rhine, where unusual for all plays, the dialogue is specifically anti-fascist, with fascism exposed — the noble Paul Lukas is risking his life to fight Hitler, with Bette Davis as the achingly loyal wife to a husband not appreciated
The Little Foxes Davis is the woman in the family who is far more a capitalist exploiter than her bumbling brothers or (to her) weak ill (from living with her) husband
So I read through three of her plays, The Children’s Hour (1934), The Watch on the Rhine (1943), The Autumn Garden (1951), and watched four via DVD or YouTube videor, The Little Foxes (1941), Watch on the Rhine (1943, this script mostly by Dashiell Hammett), Another Part of the Forest (1948) The Children’s Hour (1961) — and the superb film adaptation of the inset story of her memoir, Pentimento, Julia (1977). Each of these films is either adapted (which means real changes), or revised to some extent, but they all thoroughly reflect her spirit, are what she wanted on the stage or screen. I read some startling criticism of these, much of it hostile, but some perceptive about her concerns. I also read in a book called Conversations with Lillian Hellman, edited by Jackson R. Bryer. The plays held my interest intensely despite creakiness of sets, obsolete attitudes: they are driven by intense passions working themselves out unexpectedly but compulsively.
Then I went back to a intelligent unbiased true analysis of the McCarthy era, setting it in the long history of the US against any kind of socialism in thought or political action by many powerful groups of people: David Caute’s The Great Fear and skim-read that. It is apparent that today Hellman is being erased and forgotten partly as a woman but more because she once was a communist, remained strongly committed to socialism — and offended the Partisan Review and other centrist democratic types who were for the capitalist establishment where they were themselves thriving. They wanted mild reforms no more; they colluded and could not bear that she should show up their lukewarm wishy-washyness; their chummy careerisms. I know from the Conversations she is not the kind of writer who analyses herself so it would not be easy for her to defend herself. Politics she can talk penetratingly; but is careful to say nothing about individuals in conversation and most of the time in her writing. So she is a partly unconscious writer, letting herself go, reticent about autobiographical elements too raw for to confront. I can believe she appreciated Hammett’s help as an empathetic editor.
You can watch the whole of Another part of the Forest unabridged on YouTube for free: I hope it stays linked in here:
So — if you’ve watched the film, or now go back to it, see if you agree with some of my general usual critic-like conclusions. Hellman was a powerful insightful writer who has much to tell us about American culture, human beings, gender relationships, with her characters driven by intense desires for power, love, respect and money (the two go together in her universe), sexual desire, beautiful things; they are often fiercely aggressive, or self-protective against the expected aggressions of others; they do yearn for love; they can have strong ideals and stick to them and work hard to defeat what they see as evil beliefs and ways. They may be dressed anachronistically to us, be surrounded by absurd settings, over-emote in the sentimental way expected in the the 1940s and still in popular movies and theater. Hellman is not a writer for small subtle coteries. She gets them quickly into emotional imbroglios which we (or I) watch or read with fascination — sometimes appalled. Another Part of the Forest woke me up to the continual racism of 1940s movies — it was such another as Gone With the Wind with its recreation of this Southern world still mourning the defeat of the confederacy. Black people are only there as servants, sometimes good strong people (especially older woman) but also presented as childlike, doing only menial tasks. Maybe all the more they are not at all obsolete because they teach us about attitudes held towards Black people as late as the 1940s, though for some of the films you’d have to cut scenes, and for others you could color-blind cast and get an even stronger play.
I’d like to devote the rest of this blog just to The Children’s Hour, as it reveals some of Hellman’s more hidden values & feelings not usually discussed.
I’m often struck by what people don’t talk about in literary (or other art) works. I’ve read half-way through Hellman’s now semi-famous The Children’s Hour, and while I would acknowledge the (in the play) the centrality of “ugly,” unacceptable, “unnatural” (a word used hedged with horror) desires of one female teacher for another (Martha for Karen and probably vice-versa), what’s really striking is until near the end of the second act is everything else — the motivations and behavior of a group of girls in a school ruled over by unmarried women. The school lying bully, Mary Tilford is the a girl who finds it conduces to increase her power over other girls (threats, intimidation, physical hurting, demands they become her obedient instruments) by saying and do anything, the more outrageous the better as long as she backs it up, doubles down on it, and her presence in the school brings out the worst in all around her. One man, single, Dr Joseph Cardin is the only male in the play half way through — it’s all women, very unusual — only unlike Cukor’s The Women, there is no soft affection for these characters at all. Then the lesbianism is never named; it seems to me at this point Lillian Hellman shows deep hostility to all girls’ schools, and sees females as likely to torment one another emotionally; the school itself is disciplining the girls to be obedient and gives them no reason why they should memorize what they are memorizing.
I thought of Martha Vicinus’s book on how independence was gained for the first time by numbers of women in later Victorian period, and how important it was for a girl to be allowed to go away to a school. And yes how appalled I was at her detailing and approval (it seemed) to how some girls took power over other girls through sexual relationships (not always consummated in any way) as this would form networks and mentors later on. Vicinus said such relationships were feared by parents perhaps more than a relationship with a boy, even if not sexual. Nowhere in Vicinus is the reality of mean emotions that such groups form on — this is what Hellman is after and the intimidation structures at the heart of schooling.
Curious that this is Hellman’s first original full length play — she denies writing as a woman in a way but she always is doing this. She does say she never makes a man the center of her works, it is always the female who is her important character. The real powerhouse of this play is Mary Tilford’s rich grandmother (a lot of prestige) who told that the two teachers are “unnatural” in their desires immediately phones the others parents who immediately withdraw their daughters. The girl Mary Tilford is getting back at Karen who tried to divide the nasty clique that had grown up by re-assigning bedrooms. Last thing I recognize aspects of Hellman in this worst character: like Mary, Hellman ran away, had this tight relationship with a powerful maternal grandmother, was a determined strong character ….
Upon finishing the play:
It is outdated because of the persistent even horror invested in the idea that Martha and Karen are sexually entangled and perhaps even had some physical intimacy. The implicit inference to the play is how horrible that two lives — actually 4 if you include beyond Martha and Karen, the suitor Joe, and the cousin to Martha, Mrs Mortar (what a name). In the third act there has been a trial for libel, and we come into the room where once there was a school seeing three desolated people. I was reminded of the close of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. The school has been destroyed; Karen and Martha appear to have lost a libel case against Mrs Tilford, who did the phoning to all the parents to tell them they must whisk their daughters away. Tellingly all these women but the super-wealthy Mrs Tilford fear homelessness — so did I until sometime after Jim died and I still did when Trump used to talk of terminating social security and more gov’t jobs (that’s what Izzy has). Until this generation of women who are brought up to work outside the home for remuneration and demand a living wage, have a career, this was a common fear.
However, they are not giving up. Plans are afoot for Joe and Karen to marry and go with Martha to Vienna, but as the act evolves, these fall to pieces as each of the three suspects the other of lying (or telling the truth about lesbian feelings and even acts as the case may be). After protesting undying loyalty to Karen, Joe seems readily persuaded to leave Karen for ever. Mrs Mortar comes in: the nerve, she never showed up at the trial and would have been a help. She is shameless and has nowhere else to go and Karen and Martha are apparently not prepared to throw her on the streets. This happens before Martha confesses to Karen she really loves her horrifies Karen who nonetheless lets slip that she, Karen, may also have sexual desire for Karen. Martha leaves the stage, overwrought. Soon after we hear a shot — Martha has killed herself off stage. I thought of Jocasta hanging herself. Mrs Tilford arrives to apologize, to explain how she has learned that Mary was lying and had bullied another girl, Rosalie into backing her up. There is a hint Mrs Tilford still suspects that Karen and Martha are susceptible to such a dreadful love — nonetheless, they had not behaved that way, and she offers money to Karen who relents to say maybe she’ll take it — she now has nowhere to go. What’s striking though is how lesbianism is never once defended. It is telling somehow that this is Hellman’s first play, the first matter she chose to imagine and bring it before the public. A bad dream out of Vicinus’s book. I mentioned Mary, the thug lying child who spread the rumor, has aspects of Lillian Hellman as a child running away, her aggression too.
I’ll mention a role for a Black woman, Agatha, Mrs Tilford’s cook/maid/housekeeper. Very circumspect, acting on behalf of her employer while trying not to hurt anyone — very moral as all the Black characters are in all Hellman’s plays and prose. The play’s list of characters does not call for a black woman but it seems to me the character as envisaged is how Black people are seen Hellman’s texts.
The male is there central to the exposure of the girl’s lies
The 1961 movie
So now I’ve watched the 1961 movie adaptation with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner — directed by William Wyler, if I’m not mistaken with Hellman working on the script too. Unlike the 1934 movie, which ludicrously eliminated the central element of lesbianism, this one presents it as fully as Hellman apparently dared to in the year she wrote it 1934.
What I wanted to record is my amazement that as late as the 1960s the topic of lesbianism is treated with a sense of appalled horror — in the written play and now this movie, the word is never used. The characters speak of sexual love between women as just something deeply perverse and horrific. Reading about the play, it’s one of her first produced and that is fascinating because at the same time she claimed she wrote “as an exercise.” That is, she was not engaged with the topic; she further absolved herself (so to speak) by saying the story was suggested the Dashiell Hammett who came across it as something that happened in real life and told it to her.
In Kessler-Harris’s book she talks of how the original girl in the story was part of a minority group treated very badly by the majority, and thus had good reason to do what she did to disrupt the school. The girl herself had been treated with disdainful discrimination. Hellman eliminated all that (what a shame) but wanted to claim her real interest was this girl. It is true reading the play she is exposing the pettiness and cruelty of girls to one another, but I did not realize that Hellman’s changes in the girl’s ethnicity and motives and insisting on this clash between “good and evil” works to ignore in discourse what most of the powerful ending of the play is — the two women admitting to sexual feeling. In fact only one does and she kills herself — in both the play and movie. The girl’s bullying and lies are made much of when they are exposed, and Martha kills herself off stage never to be seen again. I recalled how E.M. Forster said that he could have published Maurice far earlier had he been willing to have punitive ending for his pair of young men. What was not acceptable was the happy ending — and now I know in classrooms the “problem” here for Maurice is readers can dismiss it as unrealistic. But here Karen is erased altogether
In the written play as far as I can tell it is all crushing misery for poor Karen, though she seems likely to take the money the grandmother of the mean girl offers her as compensation. In the movie there is an attempt to present Karen (Hepburn) as rising above all that happened, as somehow escaping this conformist society whose children she was schooling to be conformist. We see her walking proudly away from Karen’s funeral as if she is washing her hands and body of all this foulness. It might be too that with James Garner watching her from the sidelines the movie watcher would say, ha, see they’ll marry. I remember someone interpreting Winston Graham’s Cordelia so as to have the transgressive heroine marrying one of the male family members at the end. No sense that if this is so, it negates the whole novel.
The 1961 movie is still powerful. Since Hellman would not discuss the lesbianism as important and said it was an exercise, and that Dash gave her the story there is no easily getting beyond the barrier she builds to stop questions — unless you are a Hellman scholar and know where to look. It’s not a pleasant movie and to the modern viewer — me — off putting because of the awed sense of taboo everywhere. As late as 1961 you could present middle class people are over-dressed and living in super-elegant houses as if it were 1931.
There have been more recent play productions; as radio plays: in 1971, the play was produced for the radio by the BBC in its Saturday Night Theatre series starring Jill Bennett and Prunella Scales; in 1994, the play was again produced for the radio by the BBC in its Monday Play series, starring Clare Holman, Buffy Davis, Miriam Margolyes and Margaret Robertson.
The critics:
A beautiful still of Julia and Lillian talking — I am aware that the story of their relationship is highly fictionalized, and take it to be autofiction
I worried I was being a bit hard on Hellman for suggesting she was wiping away lesbianism, showing far more hostility than ambivalence towards women’s sexuality — well last night I read three articles on this play — not a bit of it. One critic, Mary Titus (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature) argued Hellman was murdering lesbianism, that she was exorcising out what she feared she’d be accused of for separating herself from her first husband and living independently. She linked The Children Hour to the story of Julia where it’s apparent a deep loving relationship emerged from Hellman’s and Julia’s childhood — one could call its continuance homoerotic love. Hellman would not have wanted the relationship to be seen that way.
Julia is the story of two women in love with one another, especially Julia (Vanessa Redgrave) and Julia is destroyed — like Marttha. There is a scene in the movie where one of Lillian’s old friends, a male (possibly representing Dorothy Parker’s husband who annoyed Hellman), accuses her and Julia of having lesbian feelings from childhood; she gets up and smashes him across the face and walks out.
Benjamin Kahan (Criticism) takes a different tack and suggested Hellman’s open stance as semi-promiscuous, acting like an aggressive man when it came to initiating relationships, was also a guarded performance against being accused of being a prig, a dike, a man-hater. In the 1930s audiences would regard all girls’ schools as possibly luring a girl into relationships which would get in the way of the important marriage. I do not think this play an insincere disguise — Judith Butler’s idea that behavior is one long performance has a lot to answer for. Hellman punishes the one open lesbian hard.
In a third essay, this one reviewing the history of films meant for a wider public daring to deal with issues of homosexuality and lesbianism, Chon Noriega (Cinema Journal) found that lesbianism was less accepted than male homosexuality, at the same time it was seen (in the play and film from the point of view of aimed-at watcher-response) as showing the dangers of putting girls together in all women environments. I felt there was hostility in Hellman’s original play to the whole idea of an all girl school taught all by women. I would here agree with Vicinus how unfortunate this reaction is — for it was in such schools and environments women were given the first chance they had to train and hope for professional lives outside marriage.
I do know that nowadays with all the talk of Hellman as a great playwright it is very hard to get copies of her plays. Hardly any of her screenplays are in print — only the one she is said to have written with Hammett. And there is such emphasis on how he wrote with her, corrected her stuff. Her prose memoirs are what’s wanted. My edition of her plays is old and has no notes. The one summer Jim and I and Izzy rented a house in Vermont and each evening took a drive to see a great play we saw a production of Autumn Garden. Jim thought it the best play we saw all summer. Unfortunately neither of us remembers much as we were sitting way in the back and it was a long drive.
Elizabeth (Olivia Coleman), Philip (Tobias Menzies) and Anne (Erin Doherty) — Seasons 3-4
Elizabeth (Claire Foy), Philip (Tobias Menzies) Seasons 1-2 (1947-1955)
Not only are seasons 1 & 2 one story, with a couple of overriding themes; seasons 3 & 4 are the same story morphing later in time: the cost of the crown to all who are connected to it in the warping of their characters, destruction of dearest hopes. Most of the characters who have any depth of integrity or individual gifts find they must give up fulfilling an individual identity or desire in order to act out a conventional role that pleases the public; for money and prestige, they trade inner liberty, and several of them happiness. There seems to be no retreat for anyone, and for those who stay, as they age, they grow harder or more silent in order to survive … Even with the absence of virtuoso displays of emotion — except Tobias Menzies once, Josh O’Connor once, and fleeting arresting moments by Helena Bonham Carter, Geraldine Chaplin (as Duchess of Windsor) and even the reigned-in, mostly iron self-controlled Olivia Coleman — there is real depth, as in a novel by Ishiguro or Austen, just beneath the calm surface.
Friends and readers,
It’s been a rather long time (2018) since I wrote a blog on the first two seasons of this well-done effective serial. At the time I suggested that one story shaped both seasons centrally; that of Elizabeth (then Claire Foy) and Philip (Matt Smith), with the side characters exemplifying parallel themes, so now I’m here to say that similarly Seasons 3 ad 4 are one story shaped by the same theme for a younger pair of characters, Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Diana Spenser (Emma Corrin), with the older Elizabeth (Olivia Coleman) and Philip (Tobias Menzies) showing the results of their choices and insisting the next generation make the same sacrifices they did. But season four so complicated by nearness of events in the lives of Charles and Diana, it will take two separate blogs to do both seasons justice.
The young Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) on the phone with Peter Townsend
Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), many years later showing the human cost of her role
The films depict slowly, at length and consistently a development of inexorable embedded emotional burdens each of the major characters finds he or she has to bear as a result of being related to, and supported by (financially especially) the Crown. Most of the characters who have any depth of integrity or individual gifts find they must give up fulfilling an individual identity or desire in order to act out a conventional role that pleases the public. For money and prestige, they trade inner liberty, and several of them happiness. There seems to be no retreat for anyone, and as they age, they grow harder or more silent in order to survive. The individual situations of these privileged people are made to resonate with experiences the ordinary person can identify with, or watch Writ Large. Seasons 1 & 2 Elizabeth and Philip begin with an idealistic love, and after years where she is driven to not keep her promise to Philip to let him fulfill his desires and have a say in his choices equal to hers, and betray others like her sister, Margaret (Vanessa Kirby), Elizabeth hardens into a partly self-alienated person. She wants to control others too, like the space and power and ever-so-respected functions she acts out. Seasons 3 & 4, Elizabeth has hardened, Philip has reconciled himself (with occasional strong regrets), and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter, superb in the part) alternates between bitterness and an avid devouring of what is thrown to her by way of compensation. All are warped. At the third season’s end though we see the cost open up through Margaret’s near suicide and her and Elizabeth’s conversation of what this life has cost them. In the fourth, Margaret is the only one among the older generation to voice any doubt about the infliction of marriage on Charles to a girl he doesn’t know, understand and it seems cannot love
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The real Elizabeth I, The Crown‘s Elizabeth — at Aberfan (Season 3, Episode 3) where miners lost dozens of their children
Philip in mid-life crisis, both “Bubbikins” and “Moonstruck” (Episodes 4 and 7): he find he must acknowledge who his mother is; he jeers at the institution of a church where men meditate, only to find himself glamorizing the astronauts, dreaming of himself as one, in need of companionship and confession
The first four and seventh episodes swirl around the question of what Elizabeth has become as a person, how much she now thinks it’s her job to remain estranged from usual human emotion, and how far this has become natural to her. It’s a role that does not give Coleman much opportunity for virtuoso emoting. Her best moments are in “Aberfan” (4:3) where she slowly bends, and “The coup” where, the political matter, Mountbatten’s (Charles Dance) attempt to stage a coup is overshadowed for Elizabeth too as she sees what happier warmer person she’d have been if she had been allowed to make horses her life (caring for them, racing them) alongside someone with a similar empathic nature, Porchey (John Hollingwood a rare carryover from Season 2), how happier she would have been. Philip is a tamed man, it seems also sexually, but if you watch the character, he is the same man (or type) as in Seasons 1 & 2 with the difference he is repeatedly given the last word on an issue, his conservative pragmatism honored, his shame over his mother, then thwarted masculinity sympathized with, given room. Tor me the best episode in the season is “Moonstruck”, not so much for his naive glorifying of the astronauts, but the way he comes down from deriding the incoming Dean of Windsor Robin Woods (Tim McMullan) to asking for help, from distrust to deep friendship. As opposed to Season 2 where Elizabeth is presented as understanding the boy Charles better than his father, “”Tywysog Cymru” shows Elizabeth out of sympathy with Charles presented as sensitive, literary, seeking validation when confessing, wanting to assert his truth against hers as a lead in to why. The second finest is the last episode: Margaret’s story glimpsed in “Margaretology,” and again here and there, but brought out emphatically and movingly in “Cri de coeur” where suddenly she is presented as an overt parallel to a hidden Elizabeth, who wonders what she has done with her life as the UK seems to have gone down (she means in prestige and power).
I move on to individual episodes and dwell more on those episodes most strong. One must remember a lot is fiction, and sometimes politically what is asserted to have happened didn’t, e.g., Margaret did not persuade Johnson to lend the British enormous amounts of money, did not revel in his vulgarities; Mountbatten did not propose a coup; he was approached by a reactionary cabal of Tories who loathed the success of socialism under Atlee, and the liberal-social consensus of Wilson (Jason Watkins), and he turned them down twice.
Episode 1, “Olding,” Elizabeth moves from instinctive distrust of the new labor PM, Wilson, an inheritance from Churchill; she worries he’s a mole from Moscow, when betrayer turns out to be her much respected art historian, Sir Anthony Blunt (Samuel West), here a vengeful oily cold calculating villain who trades threat for threat with a newly stern Philip at hour’s end (don’t you know all communists must be vile?). Random moments showing the Snowden marriage (Ben Daniels) is none, Margaret in distress, drinking slips into Episode 2, “Margaretology:” with Coleman and Menzies all quiet self-controlled, Carter steals the scenes, but Johnson (a thankless role for Clancy Brown) a caricature, simply a frivolous vulgarian, behaving from silly motives of vanity flattered, with the thwarted artist (Daniels) given hardly any screen time.
Brilliant and daring use of voice-over and narration, attributing inner thoughts to the ravaged faces of parents we see. The film-makers (director, script) turned a disaster remembered ever after when the queen showed she could be or was heartless, indifferent, stone cold into an explanation of how she felt deeply but couldn’t get herself to show it — and so rendered the incident deeply moving — they hired well known actors for bit parts of the parents: I spotted Ruth Wilson; Richard Harrington had speaking lines. We saw how everyone else was grieving — or couldn’t help themselves spontaneously — from the PM, to Margaret, to Tony Armstrong-Jones, to Phillip (Menzies managed to steal the show each time he flinched).
This did sideline the real problem: the board had not kept up regulations so that the mine became dangerous — it was pointed out it was under the Tories the situation evolved but this was turned into Mrs Wilson berating Wilson for being “a wimp” and not going after someone else, i.e., the queen as scapegoat. It was therefor hard to film on location: many remember what happened less than 50 years ago, many still suffering and the lack of any true social relief or active compassion from these super-rich Tory types has not been forgotten. Olivia Coleman did show strength in her her fierce lighting into Wilson when he turned up for “going behind her back” (as if they both controlled the newspapers) is memorable but the episode is too much “See the Queen learn a lesson; poor lady can’t get herself to cry.” Let us recall that Hillary Clinton held herself firm, and it was held against her, while were she to have wept she’d have been mocked. Still you won’t forget this episode. I noticed some holdovers from Season 2, in actors playing Elizabeth’s near entourage; this provides needed felt continuity.
It’s the way the disabled & abused Princess Alice (Jane Lapotaire) in her nun’s outfit smokes that makes her seem so vulnerable
Episodes 4-6. “Bubbikins:” Philip wants to make himself felt: goes on TV to say Royals are not overpaid, derided, so makes a documentary about how ordinary they are, and it tanks terribly. Jane Lapotaire is profoundly memorable in the way she seems to capture the phases of this unfortunately disabled woman’s life, and so at last Philip learns a lesson against pride and vanity when he accepts her, now living in the palace (against his will) way upstairs, near Princess Anne, but found by reporters what she had to say resonated with the public. “The Coup” went a step too far for me. Not Charles Dance’s magnificent performance as Mountbatten, and Mountbatten had a ancien regime heart, fiercely militaristic (would have recited Kipling with gusto), but the sympathy for the coup, democracy made a veneer that doesn’t matter (see Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall if you think that). All hinged on the queen saying no. This reminded me of On the Waterfront, which justified informers (these are not to be confused with whistleblowers), justified Elia Kazan for naming names at the HUAC hearing in 1950s. The queen’s lesson was lamenting to Porchey (John Hollingworth looking remarkably like Joseph Kloska) and then trying to live this other not permitted unlived life, when she is needed to stop coups. I was touched by her regret, but disbelieved the coup story as improbable (and see above) — had just seen the powerless Alice. The episode ended with Philip coming in the room, talking of Dickie, and admiring her. She makes a sign she will go to bed with him tonight, and he is all quiet delight. After all the queen’s life is not so bad is what Coleman suddenly radiates …
Porchey and Elizabeth snacking inbetween places, races, horse riding …
“Tywysog Cymru” The investiture of Charles in Wales moving, the episode built very slowly to create genuine feeling of real relationship between the Welsh politician anti-monarchical tutor, Tedi Millward and Charles, so Elizabeth’s hard cold reproaches to Charles for adding his own ideas into the ceremony come as a shock, as cruelty. Psychologically she is herself deeply repressed, (we might see) resentful over that unlived life she grieved for in previous episode. Maybe we are to infer the aim of her her life is not to have a self, as she repeats, do nothing, repel the inner life, something she is determined to inflict on Charles. Olivia Coleman acts the deeply dislikable mother memorably but is such a hard icy-presence that this viewer found Josh O’Connor’s the multi-faceted performance — if his ability to be piteous without incurring disdain (on display here), were more to the fore in season 4, the evenness of the presentation of the pair until 4:8 when we see that Charles will not give Diana a chance — will not pick up that phone — we would not feel that Diana was the only victim sacrificed on the altar (say it) of riches and prestige for the Windsor (German name now lost) family.
Episode 7: “Moonstruck:” At last they gave Tobias Menzies something adequate to his talents: Philip feeling the frustrations of existing in a fish bowl and spending his “job” time as a symbol at occasions that seem silly, and also those worthy. It all begins with his irritation at having to go to church by 9 am and listen to a doddering old fool of a Dean. So the queen hired a new man she thought Philip might like: Robin Woods, but Philip is not going to church any more. This new man asks if he can have the use of one of the unused buildings on the property as a center for spiritual renewing; Philip finds himself asked to go and when he has to sit there listening to these depressed men, he bursts out in cruel excoriation of them, ridiculing them. He tells them they will feel valued and part of the world if they were active. “How about cleaning up this floor!” he nearly shouts and he rushes out. The camera on the face of McMullan as Wood intensely controlled.
Philip then gets so caught up with watching intensely the moon landing as whole Royal family gathers around the TV. But they leave after a few hours maybe, while Philip sits there it seems for days. He is identifying, bonding and thinking himself an “airman” himself, their equivalent and to prove it endangers himself and a courtier with him by flying the machine way too high. Then he demands 15 minutes with heroes (he did meet them). We see him writing questions, and when finally (most reluctantly) they come in, he finds his questions cannot be asked — they are young, inarticulate, hardly gave deep thought to what they were doing –too busy. They have silly questions about life in the palace for him.
Then cut to Philip walking away and then close up he is sitting and talking very gravely at this misapprehension he had of them and as he goes on we realize he is facing Wood and his clergymen needing spiritual renewal — Menzies delivers an extraordinary speech baring his soul insofar as such a man could, apologizes to them. Then we see them walking out and Philip looking more cheerful. An intertitle tells us the real Duke formed a close friendship with Wood and in later years this organization became one Philip was very proud of. The queen seen in the distance walking her dogs, looking on. Her face lightens with relief and cheer.
Doesn’t sound like much. Watch it. Or read the speech:
There wasn’t a specific moment, uh, when it started. It’s been more of a gradual thing. A drip, drip, drip of of doubt disaffection, disease, dis discomfort. People around me have noticed my general uh, irritability. Um Now, of course, that’s that’s nothing new. I’m generally a cantankerous sort, but even I would have to admit that there has been more of it lately. Not to mention, uh, an almost jealous fascination with the achievements of these young astronauts. Compulsive over-exercising. An inability to find calm or satisfaction or fulfillment. And when you look at all these symptoms, of course it doesn’t take a genius to tell you that they all suggest I’m slap bang in the middle of a [CHUCKLES] I can’t even say what kind of crisis … [I skip some of the words] … Some of which I can admit to in this room, and some of which I probably shouldn’t. My mother died recently. [CLEARS THROAT.] She she saw that something was amiss … It’s a good word, that. A-Amiss … “How’s your faith?” she asked me. I’m here to admit to you that I’ve lost it. And without it, what is there? The The loneliness and emptiness and anticlimax of going all that way to the moon to find nothing, but haunting desolation ghostly silence gloom. … And so Dean Woods having ridiculed you for what you and these poor, blocked, lost souls [CHUCKLING.] were were trying to achieve here in St. George’s House I now find myself full of respect and admiration and not a small part of desperation as I come to say help. Help me. And to admit [CHUCKLES.] that while those three astronauts deserve all our praise and respect for their undoubted heroism, I was more scared coming here to see you today than I would have been going up in any bloody rocket! [CHUCKLING]
I do think that the conception of the queen this time just doesn’t give Olivia Coleman enough to work with — to show her hidden life they would need really to break with the conventions against over-voice and they would be ridiculed or criticized.
Charles and Camilla falling in love
Anne usually choral figure, presented as Philip’s favorite, here Doherty given love-making scenes, but as ever wry
Episodes 8-10: “Dangling Man:” There was a falling away, here and these with their concentration on Charles and Camilla, Anne and Andrew Parker-Bowles left me bored with its thinness. What depth the episode has is in the aging, frailty, death of Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor (Derek Jacobi) and as strong an actress as ever, as Mrs Simpson, now Duchess, Geraldine Chaplin, grieving over her dead husband, she’s unforgettable. We believe in the relationship between the dying Duke and young Charles — only with Mountbatten in the second season (the gentle Gregg Wise) had Charles had a loving authority figure before him (with the Welsh tutor it’s respect – the real Charles did learn enough Welsh to read and to try to talk).
Duke and Duchess of Windsor stepping outside their lair: Jacobi and Chaplin captured the two presences swiftly perfectly
Josh O’Connor superb at earnestness (remember him as Larry Durrell in The Durrells with Keely Hawes his generous mother)
Heath now PM.
“Imbroglio:” the criss-crossing of the Parker-Bowles with the Windsors is broken up by queen who (in time-honored manner) sends Charles away and with some help from her parents, pushes Camilla into marriage with Andrew. Heath had been brought in briefly in the previous episode and presented as fatuous; now we turn to the miners’ strike (David Wilmot memorable as Scargill); registering lives with other kinds of hard behaviors..
Margaret and Roddy meet
With her lady-in-waiting, Anne Lady Gleconner watching beach at Mystique island
The circle indicates the press taking this photo … of Margaret and Roddy (Harry Treadaway), he obediently putting cream all over her
“Cri de coeur:” This is perhaps the second best episode of the season and a powerful end. It’s about Margaret’s clinging to Armstrong and how tired of her he is, but how he finds it necessary to possess her at the same time as he is discreetly unfaithful. She cannot bear this and drawn by her Lady-in-Waiting, she finds a replacement, a young man substitute. What so strong about the episode is Margaret is presented as unconsciously obnoxious. She cries out against having to obey the conventions to hold onto her position, without apparently realizing every minute of her existence is pampered privileged, and all her comforts created by an army of obedient people around her. We do feel for her because her aging is so clear and her emotional need. We do wonder as we watch her drunken songs on her island, and her saying her happiness is finally here as she sits next to this child of a man whom she treats condescendingly. We see Elizabeth sympathizes with both Tony and Margaret, and in this episode it’s the Queen mother who acts to demand Margaret come back from the island when the newspapers photographer publishes a splash: her and Roddy’s affair. In Tony’s interview with Elizabeth (she summons him to see what she can do) he produces photos of her when younger; we see fleetingly Claire Foy and Matt Smith in a relaxed moment. The theme of this final episode is probably more about how time has gone by, and how old they’ve become than how everyone all around them kowtows — though this is emphasized too.
Summoned herself, by the Queen Mother, Margaret returns to find Tony waiting for her. Both of them kick the used Roddy out — but he was letting himself be used. The next scene, the queen has bid adieu to the prime minister, and news of Margaret’s attempt to kill herself has broken. A secondary story seen briefly: Wilson replaces Heath, but he cannot stay for he has Alzheimer’s and we see him and Elizabeth bid adieu; they had become friends, he calling her a lefty and himself a royalist. Margaret had asked her how many PMS have there been since she was queen: seven, says Elizabeth. The background story of Labor win, Wilson’s return as PM but what Elizabeth suddenly makes explicit is she’s been there to record England’s decline. Margaret all in pieces in the penultimate scene. Margaret’s act implies she finds nothing in life to satisfy her; but it is Elizabeth who expresses doubt about what her life has been worth, what has she done for her kingdom. Margaret has been terrific at being a sister. And then Margaret tells Elizabeth they must carry on. And it ends on the day of the jubilee.
In a “recap,” Carolyn Hallemann suggests the best scenes of all four seasons are those given over to Margaret’s story. Roddy’s work as her gardener is the equivalent of her lady-in-waiting, there to serve her desires. This last episode has brilliantly suggestive moments conveying the different relationships so quickly; Margaret and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Alice Glenconner (Nancy Carroll), a seemingly casual moment caught by a camera. Margaret says that is their function, to paper over cracks and Elizabeth glad to see Wilson in their weekly meet-ups.(He is her favorite after Churchill.) This is just an outline; the depth of feeling in this one is perhaps the greatest of all this season, for finally we see at its end that (whether true or not) Elizabeth says she needs Margaret to help her stand it. Not Philip, not her son. Margaret’s role as sister has been performed magnificently.
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Note how we end: private lives must give way, the eye of the monarch on seeming to be there stable as ever, as groundwork for political belief-system (to be cont’d).
Geraldine Chaplin as Duchess of Windsor aka Mrs Simpson embodied the theme of private life ravaged — what happens when you won’t give it up, proud lonely woman near breakdown.
It’s as if the serial had set out to justify the decision of Harry and Meghan to walk away.
Shots of different parts of the long cortege of a village near Arras, May 1940
A fine film very much worth watching just now. Christian Carion’s Come What May more or less uniformly condemned by reviewers is a beautiful intelligent anti-war film centering on an exodus across France, now forgotten, as villages fled the German invasion. The still below is one of the many black-and-white photographs that introduce, are scattered throughout the film, and conclude it. The film itself is in beautiful colors, accompanied by remarkable touching appropriate music by Ennio Morricone. Carion is telling a family story: he was born in this area; his mother had been part of this exodus; it is also crucial French history he feels. The film may be regarded as a coda to A French Village; there the people stayed put; here they went into flight. Our particular group turns round and heads back home. Interpersed is the story of three young men, Scottish (Matthew Rhys), German (August Diehl) and French (Laurent Gerra). A boy (Josioh Marion who stands for the thousands of children separated from parents), another Mayor, a cafe owner. Another bridge is blown up. And we have a goose who is really terrified of the sounds of the airplanes and passing tanks. A Review.
Friends and readers,
You owe this blog to my determination to tell whoever comes here that pace the reviewers of this film who disdained it, this is a very good film. They seem to have pushed it right out of the theaters with their obtuse disdain and distrust (I must call it) of any tender feeling, belief in some kind of responsibility in people, impatience at orchestra music. For all these characteristics, this is a fine film for our time. I urge my readers to watch it (streaming on Amazon prime, as a DVD from Netflix, as a good DVD with three feature to buy) and tell others. I find myself half-wondering if the reason it seems so hard to persuade people to act on their social instincts, to feel for others as themselves, is that a film like this is sneered at. As a result our entertainment is FX type fascist hard violence and Barbie doll strong genital sex; characters must be presented as mean, performative, competitive or we are supposed unable to believe in them.
I watched Come What May as a sort of short companion piece, a coda to A French Village (about which I have written three times, Scroll down and also click on the links). In A French Village, mayor and people decided to stay put. In Come What May, they tried to escape the power-hungry cruel Nazi and French collaborative regime. In type Carion liked the film to a western in genre: the landscape is a character with wanderers in its purview.
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For a third time, last night I was just immersed in Christian Carion’s Come What May (En Mai, Fais ce qu’il plait). The first night I watched I was touched by the story, involved with the actor-characters, just loved the music, the quiet lyricism of the whole treatment, and then was astonished to discover that the reviews hardly covered what happened (like wikipedia can barely be bothered), or outright condemned it! At RogerEbert.com Odie Henderson resented it as “feel good” schmaltz — how this can be when two of the major male characters are killed, with many other unnamed minor ones, when we see a village fleeing in terror of the German’s desire for revenge (for WW1) and then turn around to go back after they’ve been hit hard twice (airplane bombing, tanks) and realize they will only meet more of the same at the coast. Far from one dimensional, the characters are suggestive presences within a larger group.
Another more complained it was not violent enough; people not sufficiently ravaged, not really a war movie at all. This is probably true, as the extraordinary composer who wrote the original score (beautiful, evocative, and uneasy), Ennio Morriconne says (in one of three features on the DVD) he agreed to write the music because the film is not a “movie about war, it is a movie during the war,” not filled with violence, speed, terror, but about the people who are enduring war, their experience, about a journey, flight, hardship, people behaving under pressure.
The first encounter of two of our heroes, the Scottish captain, Percy (Matthew Rhys) and the German communist, Hans (August Diehl) — Percy on his way to Dunkirk
The teacher who adopts Hans’s son, Suzanne (Alice Isaaz) and the Mayor, Paul (Olivier Gourmet) emerge as leaders
Propaganda film-maker (Arriflex)
The second time was when I watched this feature about the music, the orchestra, then the feature The making of Come What May, where we learn how this is a family story for Carrion: he came from Arras, his mother experienced just this exodus when she was 8, and he was hurrying to make the film before she died. Carion said his parents wanted to reach Canada but they never left France at all. His father was a mayor of a village. One of the extras hired was an 80 year old woman who had been four in 1940 and been part of the exodus; he brought along a goose because his mother said his family had had a goose and the goose proved to be expressive, hiding with terror during the sequences of passing planes and tanks:
The goose’s eyes would just peep out
For him the film also realizes a moment of crucial French history, where the gov’t made the wrong choices (capitulation because the people were so exhausted still from the horrors of World War One). Far from “sentimental” (another review found it mawkish), what Carion is showing us incident by incident is bleak history of savage senseless destruction, with storekeepers on the way seeking to charge high prices for water and food, complete indifference in the Germans to whoever they come upon; with aimless throwing of high powered fire weapons, wreaking death. Yes our sensibilities are not allowed the close-up thrill, the super-shock of barbaric exultation. No over-excitement, incessant noise and distraction. One German dies quietly banging his head against his tank, asking the boy to help him die.
Carion’s conscious method is to epitomize history by anecdote (that’s true) so the opening tells through a single incident how at the opening of the war 300,000 Germans fled Germany (communists, Jews, homosexuals) and came to France as the land of liberty; they were rounded up, put in camps and after the “armistice” was signed, sent back to Germany, slaughtered on the way or at the camps when they got there. I then watched with the voice-over commentary where Carion talked of how difficult it was to film this in the northern countryside, to traipse about with a couple of hundred people, animals: horses (exhausted and frightened at the bombs and high startling noises now and again), pigs, cows, and young babies too.
Percy and Hans, with the third hero, the French peasant farmer, Albert (Laurent Gerra) who is simply carelessly shot to death by the film-makers in order to intimidate a group of African soldiers — it seems this kind of scene of camaraderie especially offended the reviewers
The third time, stubbornly (I felt) just the movie itself now that I had enough to appreciate what I was invited slowly to experience. Then I concentrated on the famous actors and was affected by the serendipity of what happened. The film and performances had much quiet humor, as life does. The story proper begins (like A French Village) in May 1940, where a village is more exercised by its wind-mill and water pump than the coming Nazis. We see the important townsman in the local central cafe; the teacher adopts the boy of the German man they have turned over to authorities (Hans).
Suzanne and Max (Joshio Marion)
After the imposition of rationing and terror tactics from the air, the town decides to leave and we see them packing up. In these transition momemts Morricone’s music is especially effective.
Morricone: “I will make the music for the people to decide to live and find another place to be safe. To fine liberty, to walk with self-possession.”
Prisons are opened up — and Hans escapes. Hans meets in the countryside Percy; they both stumble upon Albert. Carion says he wants to pay tribute to types of people in the way. The English held out. Core scenes are where the men learn to be friends, learn to lean on one another to succeed.
Deserted family home
Carion says he now saw himself as John Ford as he filmed the landscape as another character; the people are resisting sorrow, drinking and dancing companionably the second night, dancing to radios happening. The teacher encourages Max to leave notes on the blackboard in chalk for his father. Max cries, but he write them, cheerful notes to Papa. But as the walk goes on, the atmosphere darkens; we see bodies along the side of the road (some killed), colonies of people shot up. The mayor joins forces with the cafe owner as they become a lead couple. There are a series of scenes at a store, and in a deserted farmhouse. Soldiers frightened, shoot to kill. The pass a village, and the thee young men are now close behind.
The cafe owner, who also drives one of the trucks is Mado (Mathilde Seignier)
Now an attack by the airplanes (computer generated and tough to pull off as really there, making the right sounds too), and as the bombs fall, Max flees. The teacher is forced to leave him behind. Hans comes next and thinks his son among the young children buried. There are scenes of the group passing bridges, and in one case it is blown up behind them — bridges are ever being blown up in war films (wars too). They see from afar or pass by other groups of (it seems) pilgrims. On the road, Percy captured.
In a final set of scenes, the film-maker seems to persuade Percy to play his bagpipes freely for the film; in fact Percy had seen the film-maker murder Albert and when the camera is finished, Percy shoots the film-maker directly so irritated is he by this phonyness — a self-reflexive sequence. Alas Percy then shot to death in turn. In a fantasia sequence, Hans finds his son Max.
You can take it as a dream, but it is meant to be real, for eventually Suzanne catches up and joins Hans and Max. The village has decided to turn back, but she will forge ahead. They are on their way to the north shore, Calais, with an address given them by Percy.
The last image we see is that of the three people, a new family walking into the horizon.
At the opening, throughout and again with the credits there are photographs from the 1940s of this real history exodus or evacuation.
Burdened with children and the aged
Man smoking
Another monumental woman
Don’t miss this film. It enabled me to forget for a while the nightmare circus of an aspiring dictator (Trump) ruining an election, spouting fantastic lies and distortions, fomenting racial killings to justify sending into “democrat cities” brutal police — in an effort to turn all into criminality and lawlessness where he thinks he can thrive on fear and imprisonment. What the people in the film are fleeing is an earlier Hitlerian-Goebbels arrangement (only Trump has Barr, Wolf, Pompeo, McConnell …)
The truth is that ‘peeling away the encrusted myth’ of Cleopatra reveals there is very little underneath the ancient fictional surface, and certainly nothing that can be the stuff of a plausible life story — unless it is padded out with half-relevant background … the best we have is a possible ‘signature’ on a document authorising tax concessions and the report that in her final days she muttered again and again ‘I shall not be led in triumph — Mary Beard, “Cleopatra, The Myth,” Confronting the Classics
I don’t remember when I first heard the name, Mary Beard, nor how I came to acquire and read her Confronting the Classics (a short review), but since then I’ve followed her, nowadays on twitter, as well as off. I remember how I was bored silly by the to me inane Epic of Gilgamesh, and couldn’t understand how anyone could substitute this as an assignment in college as from the ancient world instead of Virgil’s profound, beautiful, intelligent Aeneid. And then I read Beard’s defense of Roman or Latin literature not as opposed to but as texts as interesting as these originally Greek ones. Beard was, is, also continually a fresh thinking original feminist. She is still the only writer I read, to talk about women in the ancient world in ways that make them living relevant presences.
Then years later, since my younger daughter, was a lover of Latin, minoring in it in college, and is a reader, I was actually anxious that she should want to read and enjoy Beard’s SPQR. When I bought it for her for Christmas, was so relieved when I’d see her reading it — with avid interest. Tonight I was reading Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, and am not surprised to find that she is writing about this woman and her peer, Eugenie Sellers, in ways no one hardly ever writes about admired people: telling the inward petty and crucially important personal politics that shaped their careers. It takes hard research to get to that sort of information. Were they and most of the people she is writing about not dead, Beard would now have as many enemies as the maligned journalist, Julian Assange, for this is how he began.
Don’t be satisfied with the tale of Harrison in Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, for, good as Wade’s book is, she falls for the myth of Harrison as exposed by Beard; there is even more to Harrison’s achievement than is recorded by Wade
Then recently I opened up her Women and Power, two essays. The first is about how the public voice of women is treated: their sound is too high-pitched, so shrill, and not acceptable, their content emotional and when obviously knowledgeable school-mistress-y. She offers example after example of men silencing women, and several were close to my own experience. One happened the other day on Trollope&Peers! a male bully who hardly ever posts, suddenly got on to excoriate me for writing about Australia: how dare you? you are not Australia and show what an ignorant moron you are. No compunction whatsoever. She had the effect of validating my sense of this insult and revealed the pattern beneath it —
There are so many reviews of her books, that while I have needed her, I decided she does not need me or another blog or review to tell people what you are missing out on – for she is witty, idiosyncratic in her choices, personal, and I’m ever learning new information about another place, another figure, another work, or some unexpected insight. I also thought to do justice to her would take a book. All I could do is cite the books and urge you not to miss any. But about a year ago I started to feel compelled to write something when I came across an excoriating attack on one of her TV entertaining documentaries. Women as well as men castigating her for exposing the fallacy that when we look at naked bodies of women in art, we react to them viscerally as bodies, even when they are ever so tastefully done, and given learned names to obscure that they have most often functioned as pin-ups. The idea of the pompous Kenneth Clark unclothed (so to speak) was gratifying.
She allowed a drawing of her naked: this Guardian article brings out the Berger-take of the program
But when I started to watch her Shock of the Nude, I found she was misrepresented: far from dwelling on this (as it is so obvious) the programs were about how a single type of European woman has filled the space of what is reproduced when there are so many types of bodies, not to omit gene pools and ways of depicting bodies. It’s an elaboration on the specific topic from the perspective John Berger developed in his Ways of Seeing. We glimpse the actual motives of the people who made the object, the politics projected at an audience by an establishment “voice.” But to be as frank as she, what the men especially hated most of all is the way she looks. They cannot stand that she refuses to turn herself into as close a version of the Barbie Doll or socially comely academic woman in interview outfit for her shows. Her hair is unstyled (would be the word), her body lumpy, she wears only what make-up the film-makers must put on her to withstand film lighting. Those are her real long and discolored teeth. Of course it’s a pose, and she now has a trademark with her bike, but it’s a pose in another cause for candor as the only humane wisdom: this time what aging and other women actually look like.
Now I’ve just watched (and re-watched — a habit of mine) her early series, Meet the Romans, her contributions to Civilisations, and her [Ultimate?] Rome: Empire without Limit, and feel I ought to say something relevant to this dangerous and destructive era the Republicans, their Trump mascot, and all the wealthy and powerful people increasing a stranglehold of immiseration and downright murder on not only the US but people around the world variously connected to us: the theses of her two Roman series, which she makes convincing is that this ordinary village on this boot-like peninsula in the Mediterranean became a successful society, and extended out to become prosperous, educated, and (dare I say) a comfortable people because they were inclusive.
It was their original idea to make everyone who came within the purview of their power and ever extending land-mass Roman, to welcome into their civilisation all sorts of people, and thus circulate the knowledge, skill, and yes labor and natural products of lands across the globe. Indeed much that the vicious regimes of the world today are doing (except the step-by-step process in the US, and jump elsewhere into terrifying dictatorship) is what what the Romans didn’t do: race hatred especially. I took down my daughter’s book for the first time and found that in SPQR are the theses for these documentaries (read Emily Wilson’s more detailed review). They were flexible when it came to changing laws; they went in for people power. It was a genuinely mixed society because in the province power was given to local elites. Join with Rome, and you too can have this salary, these benefits. Everyone above say the working class level and the enslaved gets a percentage of the take. And the enslaved can buy themselves back.
The book and these series are not about its decline and fall (which it did) but about why it succeeded for so long — besides ruthless fearful military brutality — she does not mince words over the cruelties and harshnesses of this empire. In one episode (Part 3 of Ultimate Rome) we see a frieze of a fierce Roman soldier subduing and about to rape a supplicant woman, an image of Rome triumphing over Britain. One episode of Meet the Romans she seeks out how the average Roman who lived in the city survived & shows them in tiny dark flats in apartment houses, where just about nothing was in the space except room to sleep: all other functions, including drinking water, bathing (defecating), eating had to be done outside this space which was heavily peopled. To her credit, she does bring out what life was like for the average person.
Perhaps the Roman story is still too upbeat. Unlike the books, she does omit women. She doesn’t lie. She warns that stories about the fun adulteresses might have had are masculine bad dreams; stories of fiercely violent Amazons are probably glamorized fantasies based on what the Romans saw in the violent tribalism of Scythian groups. (Anyway who wants to idolize violence?) It was not the brutality of the Romans that made for their ultimate success, just a first step (bad joke alert). In her Pompeii, she takes us into excavated homes of the victims; she tries to realize what a family life might have been. The figures chance immortalized at moments of terror do convey what people are up against in nature (as well as what is often missing in other episodes from one another)
Pompeii people
These programs have our present era very much in mind.
From Ultimate Rome, Episode 3
They are also wondrously enjoyable because they are travelogues to places you, I, or your package tour company is not going to think of going to. I did not feel as if I was looking at fake pictures of landscapes, but genuine filming of out-of-the-way places where Roman buildings, forums, monuments, roads, these circular stadiums (levels upon levels), acqueducts, left over remnants of households are still extant. She films in Northern England, along the Hadrian wall where archeaologists have been very busy, in Algeria, southern Spain, Turkey, western Germany. Even if I had the money and the profound unhealthiness of airplane and modern boat travel had not been exposed, as an ordinary person I could not see what she shows in museums, factories, not to omit Pompeii and Herculaneum. She is invited to go where the rest of us who are not in the profession can’t. You see people in the marketplaces and in Rome today too — in France, in London.
In Bath — where I have been
I admit I sometimes enjoy her straight lectures on YouTube more than I do her documentaries, which are meant for a much wider audience than my taste. Her patter to me can be contentless; if there is a line of argument, sometimes it is obscured by gnomic suggestiveness. She is unwilling to criticize where I think she should. One of her assignments on Civilizations was to showcase (would be the word) religious buildings around the world once Roman (Europe and the middle east as it’s called mostly), but had it been Simon Schama (he is the main presenter) he would have managed to include sharp observations on what religious practices can mesmerize people into accepting. Her books provide more honest scrutiny. She is inclined to be optimistic, altogether too cheery — during this pandemic, she has had BBC shows in her kitchen. That sort of thing …
But she is always intelligent. During the Brexit controversies when there was still time, to put a stop to this lunacy of some segments of the British upper classes and the ignorant deluded nationalist solutions to economic distress in working class people, her TLS columns were ever on point and I wished she was in Parliament. I still do. Probably my favorite book is also still Confronting the Classics.
Filming in Rome
The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us
that the Duchess was going to have a baby.
And in the brothels of Marrakesh
the little pockmarked prostitutes
balanced their tea-trays on their heads
and did their belly-dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all — Elizabeth Bishop
“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
A still from Keri (Cats of/in Istanbul) – touching movie as much about the people who care for the cats as the cats themselves – they are waiting for fishing ships from Greece
Charles Burton Barber, Coaxing Is Better than Teasing (1883) — didactic Victorian narrative art
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit
— Christopher Smart, My Cat Geoffrey
Friends,
I’ve been wanting to write a blog on the literature of cats, about cat stories, cat pictures, cat poetry, so as to suggest that there is a particular quality to stories about cats, poetry about them, even pictures that distinguishes the “kind” from stories about animals in general, other animals, dogs, people, a sort of tone or stance that underlies and unites them all. Well, stories, images and movies not hostile to cats, not produced by crazy people who in history have conducted massacres (see Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre” in a book named after this essay) and persecuted the cat (cats endured a long period of persecution in Europe, starting in the twelfth century and ending only sometime in the nineteenth). I kept putting this off. No longer.
George Morland, The Artist’s Cat Drinking (1792)
The quality is admiration, admiration for their resilience, for their individual and group persistent survival. Stories told of stressed cats, of how against all probability, great odds, seeming counterproductive behavior, and sometimes (to the reader and poor creature enduring it) inflicted torture, they carry on. We marvel at their individuality — since there is a continual repetitive catness about their casually observed postures, stances, relationships with us.
I am moved to make this seemingly unprovable assertion and cite some of the best writing I’ve read by a given author (cat as muse), as well as about the cat, because I just read and then re-read, savoring as I went V. S. Naipaul’s The Strangeness of Grief, posted online December 30th, 2019 and printed January 6th in the New Yorker.
Naipaul, a wonderfully poignant ironic writer (deserved his Nobel, and the one Booker) begins with his father’s death but his essay morphs into the calamitous deaths of two cats, one carelessly murdered (the mother), the other torn to bits by desert dogs (its kitten), and then a long history of the life and death of a kitten whom the author adopts, brings up, provides for, is companion, staff, lover and finally protector and life-prolonger of: Augustus. Augustus a cat whose life has been at risk, and near extinguished several times, but saved again and again by a vet.
My simple-minded take-away is that an outdoor cat is in very great danger of loss of life and that modern human life also presents real dangers to a cat it can’t recognize for itself. Also how fragile they are. That they have been such a successful species as a species is because they have evolved to be women’s best lover … Naipaul whose work is characterized by a deep kindness and melancholy.
Henriette Ronner-Knip (1878) — famous for her luxurious cats, this one may have been a real one she owned
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Minette the Kitten (1894)
My favorite, maybe the best book by Doris Lessing is her On Cats, which also opens with cat massacres that occurred periodically in the South Africa of Lessing’s childhood, after which she goes on to be the biographer of a Grey Cat and Black Puss, then Rufus the Survivor, and finally “the old age of el magnifico.” I wrote an appreciative essay on this book (scroll to the bottom to read her magnficent peroration) more than eight years ago: From this essay:
The closing stories are the most moving of all “Rufus the Survivor” is about a cat who has a bad home. He is mistreated. He is shut out during the day; he is too thin; it’s clear he is sometimes hit. He is cowed and has learnt to be a sycophant. It’s a story of how slowly he insinuates himself into Lessing’s home and gradually ever so gradually gets first her to allow him to stay, and then to stay for a while, and hen to live there. How he has to maneuver to get grey and black cat to accept him. How she takes him to the doctor for his ills and how he does not like it ever. Gradually he becomes braver and more confident and leaves the house to make friends. He even probably visits his ex-owner. She worries about this, but it seems the ex-owner does not try to keep Rufus. Rufus learns to show love and allow others to love him.
El Magnifico is a hero’s story. As the cat grows older, he gets cancer, and in order to have more years of life Lessing must amputate one of his legs. He cannot of course understand this. He assumes that she has utterly betrayed him not just in taking him to the Vet, but allowing this terrifically painful thing to be done. Ever after he has the worst troubles going to his litter box just outside the house (in a garden or yard), going up and down stairs, climbing things. But she cannot explain she is giving him more life.
Manning’s Miou
Then there’s Olivia Manning’s Extraordinary Cats: Lessing had tough cats; Manning had vulnerable ones. I wrote an essay on Manning’s book too (scroll all the way down). The central core of Manning’s book is a life history of specific cats she has owned and their personalities, how they interacted with other cats. She is (unexpectedly) more inward than Lessing. There are many fine deeply humane moments — a love of these animals that is deeply empathetic making the reader their valuable lives. Manning also offers real insights into the interrelationships of people and cats.
By now the reader may be saying, ‘This is ridiculous. She writes of cats as though they were humans.’ But are they so very different? The fact is that when an animal, any animal, enters one’s home, it becomes something more than an animal. The change is brought about not merely by human fantasy and human need: the animal itself is drawn out of its animal world and advances to meet our wider understanding.
Desmond Morris’s Cats in Art is the best general philosophical art history I’ve read.
The text is better than my other omnibus volume: Caroline Bugler’s The Cat: 3500 years of the Cat in Art has more pictures but her text soon gives out into a catalogue which is sheerly informative and descriptive of a particular image and they are not so well-chosen, do not delight or interest as Morris’s continually do. Morris too critiques and presents attitudes towards the cat and what we can know of the lives of the domestic cat since we have first proof of their existence. Early on they were seen as “working” animals in the sense that they attacked small animals people considered vermin; but they were also early on companions and associated with women. Then the medieval period where horrendous persecution of cats began or was first recorded. It seems to begin with the decline of learning, a deep resentment of nuns using cats as companions, and male fantasies of witches. Especially endangered (and still in danger) are black cats. The cats’ pigment system was another element that led to human cruelty in times or places where people find enjoyment in animal torture. I was roused to indignation on their behalf and getting a fuller picture of what lies behind 18th century and the kind of mass shooting of cats, throwing them from great heights recorded in the 19th century as well as by Doris Lessing. And the pictures unexplained by Bugler fall into place. I hope he traces the growth of decent behavior towards non-human animals across the 19th century. I have found talking to people today they resist the application of the word “persecution” to systematic cruelty towards cats. Throughout his book Morris uses this kind of language for not only cats but all the animals he includes: mostly domesticated, for his topic is human relationships with cats as revealed in pictures.
Paul Gaugin’s Mimi and her cat (1890)
He shows how expensive cats are the ones most painted with super-rich people in the 19th century. He is tracing art movements, and it’s telling that impressionism consciously focuses on moods of cats, their relationship to the world. The post-impressionistic yield surprises: I don’t know a number of these painters loved cats. There is a painting Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley (to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets to a gay young man may be addressed) while in prison with his cat Trixie nearby; they have the same expression. Morris describes all the cats carefully — he gives In choosing non-realistic images he is wonderfully intuitive about what speaks to us, giving them equal importance with any human animal, aware they too have a burden of existence too. I wish I could scan in them all — but you must buy and then love and savor this piece of cat literature.
Bunny and Kipper by Beryl Cook
I have too many books to talk of so now must be content now to cite but a few more of the best: by a professional vet: Nicholas Dodman, The Cat Who Cried for Help (the obtuse cruelty of owners is chilling, one removed her cat’s voice-box because the sound of the crying grated on her nerves), about attitudes, emotions, psychology of cats; Jenni Diski begins and ends with her cat, Bundy, What I Don’t Know About Animals
She calls herself “post-domestic. ” A “domestic” life in animal studies means you grew up with working animals around you (cows, chickens, horses). So her first experience of animals includes watching her mother buy, cook and then serve a chicken for the family to eat. She says soon after she felt impelled to save a baby bird from a nest who was not grateful but terrified. The bird couldn’t understand what she was aiming at, could not trust, much less love her. The result was the poor bird hid behind the stove in their small kitchen where it was dangerous, and they had to pull it out by force. By the time they prodded it out, it was badly wounded; Jenny ended up wishing the bird would die immediately. The point was how vulnerable animals are to us in our habitats.
Rosa Brett,The Hayloft (1828-82), pre-Raphaelite artist
Most books about living with animals are by women, but this very good one A Cat is Watching is by Roger A Caras: his idea is to try to enable us to see how a cat sees us; this is an enjoyable and informative book filled with revealing photos of cats at play, eating, sleeping, frightened and many black-and-white drawings and illustrations. A wee bit dull in the writing, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Tribe of the Tiger has much to tell of the inward life of the whole tribe of cats. Different species brought together, cats in different milieus and a myriad of questions and tentative answers. I suggest Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room is a (morally stupid) book which pretends to be sympathetic to cats, and keeping animals as companions (pets) but is a stealth attack on cats as ruining our environment. Don’t be fooled. Rather like Kate Chisholm’s Hunger Games is a ferocious attack on anorexics by someone claiming to have been anorexic, Tucker pretends to be a cat lover while telling us all much that we believe about having a relationship with cats is a delusion. I know how Jane Goodall would reply.
To conclude, or as to cat poetry, don’t miss Stevie Smith’s Cats in Colour or Marge Piercy’s Sleeping with Cats. This poem is from an anthology I bought as a memento from the Charlotte Smith conference (in a shop in Sussex), Cats: A Literary Anthology ed. Carolyn M. Jones (from medieval and Montaigne, to French and recent, to science, to comic chapters in novels)
Cats sleep anywhere
Any table, any chair,
Top of piano,
Window-ledge,
In the middle,
On the edge,
Open drawer,
Empty shoe,
Anybody’s lap will do,
Fitted in a cardboard box,
In the cupboard
With your frocks–
Anywhere.
They don’t care!
Cats sleep anywhere.
— Eleanor Farjeon
Les Aristochats — popular French Cartoon
I collect books about and with images of cats, from Edward Gorey to Kliban cats to Susan Herbert’s quiet parodies of “great art” and famous scenes or photographes. Here’s Gene Kelly cat in Singing in the Rain:
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 