Much Ado About Nothing set inside a TV news-as-entertainment program — Shakespeare Theater Company at the Harmon Theater (DC)

Beatrice (Kate Jennings Grant) and Benedick (Rick Holmes) as TV news anchors

Readers and friends,

As many local people (DC, Maryland and Virginia) know, the Shakespeare Theater Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (now running until Dec 11th) has been getting rave reviews. Some acknowledge you have to suspend your common sense when it comes to matching words to the action, or consistency in what happens right before us; the reviewer’s reply:  “So to Shakespeare purists I say: Reason not the need.” Supported by a strong case (I agree a number of the center actors are very good), we are to turn ourselves over to those who want to give a party

Intermittently the stage revolves and we find ourselves at a ball (this is the last scene of the play)

I don’t like being called a Shakespeare purist:  to me that means I want to see Shakespeare’s play for real at some level, a production that does justice to his text and genius. I think rather that we need not dismiss Shakespeare at all, that the production does present a coherent enough reading of the play, its transformations witty  & some appropriate. I admit as the play opened, my first reaction was to feel appalled: for a start, the characters were not following the original play’s script. I could barely hear Shakespeare’s language, there were flashing lights everywhere, lots of noise and neon. How did the production win me over until by the end I was enjoying it and had participated in genuine grief and happiness from the play?

We were in SNN (Shakespeare News Network) and hearing of episodes in Shakespeare’s other plays retold in reductive or caricatured funny ways; these punctuated the action, and they became more hilarious and more daring as the play went on. Some of the funniest had Shakespeare’s other characters’ lines as tweets. The two central stories gradually unfold, and as far as I could tell, most of Shakespeare’s best lines were kept: perhaps Kate Jennings Grant as Beatrice was too loud, too aggressive; she was (I felt) overdoing the assertion, but she was matched by Rick Holmes as Benedick undermining her. What they were doing (and I’ve seen this in other productions of MAAN) was trying to cover over, blend together two disparate stories: Hero and Claudius come near tragedy, and far from iconoclastic, and subversive of anything, they are over-the-top conventional. So the actors (Nicole King and Paul Deo, Jr) were made to speak what they had similarly loudly and with accompanying comic and romantic business also dressed absurdly:

Hero (King), Beatrice and Leonato (Edward Gero)

The theme of Shakespeare’s play is the danger of gossip, of rumor, of misinformation, and it’s from that angle the news-show as entertainment fit its themes. I found myself amused by the ingenuity of the appropriation’s details. We were worked through the farce of Benedict being fooled into thinking that Beatrice loves him and Beatrice vice-versa, with them listening from behind going into all kinds of conniption fits. Then the actors were working so hard, meant so well and at moments winked past their costumes and the action to signal to the audience. Beatrice ends in a garbage bin; when she emerges hurls a piece of pizza across the stage, she looked pointedly at us to applaud her. That sort of thing. Then we see the videotaping of two characters dressed up to resemble Hero and another man. A kind of falsification of evidence we are familiar with. As in all productions, one is then pushed into the pathos of Hero and made to feel the cruelty of the way the men humiliate Hero and her father, never giving either a chance to explain or justify themselves, and become emotionally involved:

Margaret (Dina Thomas) to the side; Benedick as in all productions ends on the side of the women

Then back to farce with the intervention of Dogberry (Dave Quay), Verges (David Bishins) and two unnamed cops as an incompetent surveillance team and secret service; at moments it all felt inspired as we moved back to hear more of what was going on in other of Shakespeare’s plays (everyone dead on the stage in Hamlet, the war in Egypt not going so well &c&c). In the better productions I’ve seen this interlude of Shakespeare’s play is not downplayed but used centrally as it was here:

I’m not going to make it better than it was. Like this summer’s DC production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, this was a frolicking, rollicking version of one of our national ritual plays meant to rouse us out of ourselves — and here, however lightly, skimmingly, to comment on our own world that has such ridiculous TV shows:  it won’t bear philosophical or political scrutiny. I wished too that Gero had been given more space and time to convey Shakespeare’s old man’s grief (I remember when he was doing the heroes of Shakespeare’s plays), but it is a kind of compliment to this play if it were not such a trek for me to get there, I’d see it twice so as to take in what was happening. I wished I were closer to the stage to hear what was said or we had surtitles.

I’d like to end on the idea that were it filmed as Kate Hamil’s dancing Sense and Sensibility has been, I’d go to see it in a theater or (better yet) stream it up close to me on my computer in my home. At the same time, as with Hamil’s staged production, a lot was done that was fun that only works in a live theater. Each time I go to a play since the pandemic entered this later stage, I am reminded that wonderful as it is to watch them from London on my computer, much is lost without the lived real presences and its accompanying sense of risk taken.

Ellen

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Summer into Autumn Reading: Travel & Regional, To Renew Your Spirit: read David Downie, see Cherry Blossoms

Cherry Blossoms (Elmar Wepper as Rudi Angermeier, and Aya Irizuki [de] as Yu)

“What I love most about this book, as about all of Downie’s nonfiction works about France, is the way the reader is brought intimately into the adventure of his discoveries as he performs his intrepid research. We are spared, of course, the many hours of reading in dusty libraries he has done for us. But when he sets out into the Paris of today in search of its ghosts of yesteryear, he takes us along with him. We are there with him as he interviews the archivist at the Victor Hugo Museum, and the director of the Arsenal Library–a gathering place for such Romantic age luminaries as Dumas, Liszt, de Musset, Delacroix, Balzac, and Gautier—a place which, Downie tells us, “hasn’t changed much since the 1820s.” We are there with him as he sneaks up back stairways and into private courtyards in his furtive attempts to connect with Romantic heroes of the past, to look out the same windows they looked out of, gaze upon the same courtyards they would have seen. We are there with him in those rare moments when he is able to commune with those spirits of the past” (Janet Hulstrand)

The impermanence of life is at the core of Cherry Blossoms, an exquisite German film directed by Doris Dorrie (How to Cook Your Life). A wonderful sequence in the story takes place during the cherry blossom season at the beginning of spring in Japan. Hanami is celebrated for about ten days as families, friends, and visitors gather under trees while their pink and white flowers are in full bloom. The cherry blossom is seen as a symbol of beauty, awakening, and the transience of life … (Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat)

Dear friends and readers,

Summer is slowly turning into autumn, and I’ve written only once of this year’s summer reading and movies: David Nicholls’s Us, book & film, probably because I’ve only read and seen one I’d so characterize, and now as the days begin to shorten more quickly, I feel I’ve been remiss, partly because my spirits have been again rejuvenated by a movie and a book.

The audio book

First, the book, which will require my speaking first of David Downie as I encountered him in his earlier Paris to the Pyrenees last spring, and providing contexts with other books, and French movies. I took a course at Politics and Prose (the DC bookstore) called A Literary Tour of France, it was somewhat disappointing as the teacher refused to discuss any serious topics (!), and seemed to live in dread of offending people in the classroom, but she did offer two books, with real merit, the equivalent of Steve Coogan and Bill Brydon’s first and second Trip movies, the one where they drive around Derbyshire, into the Lake District ending at Bolton Abbey before returning to London, and the second a journey through Italy, from Rome past Pompeii to Naples.

Somewhere in the West Riding — an idyllic dream vision of what I remember of the rare walks Jim and I took out into the Yorkshire moors

Travel books encompass books about people making a home usually in what is to me a “foreign” country; they can be the encyclopedia type Trollope favored in Australia and New Zealand, the let’s analyze this country, his North America, or his jolly When the Mastiffs Went to Iceland (the nearest he got to popular travel books). I think the genre is invented in the 18th century where the idea of truly telling the truth of what you are seeing, of cultures being different, of trying to discover history this way began with Johnson and Bowell’s twin tours; a second variant is Susannah Moodie’s 30 Years in the Bush, a classic first Canadian book, about how she settled into the countryside to become Canadian.

Jeffrey Greene’s French Spirits: A House, A Village, and A Love Affair in Burgundy, was assigned first, and begins well, but David Downie’s Paris to the Pyrenees sustains the type. Greene’s French Spirits is similarly replete with intelligent insight into places, objects, people. He and his partner are marrying and decide to buy and renovate as a place to live an ancient church: they have plenty of money, live upper class educated lives (whose values Greene never questions, the source of the money never told): Greene is trying to capture his sense of what life against history is, French culture in history, and uses these “odd people” in the countryside to bring this out. Greene’s book is light and half-way through falls off when he goes into these chapters (to me tasteless) on his wedding but it is picturesque and evocative of middle France. He and his wife renovated a presbytery to make it into a home: the history of the building and the real problems of trying to renovate such a structure are absorbing, teach one about buildings.

Downie’s Paris to the Pyrenees is a sort of sceptic’s pilgrimage across that part France and down to the Pyrenees. He’s more somber in spirit, and the character he comes across made less eccentric at the same time more locally embodied. He has rejected much that Greene is content to accept: the materialism, hierarchies, fashion-laden admiration for what reeks of rank, monetary success. Downie is exploring his own mind (quietly, not that openly), his past, and the past of the countryside he and his wife are walking through. One needs courage and a partner to do what they are doing — — just walking following an old route and not sure whether they will find an inn in a given place, or the kind of food and drink they might require. They are doing their journey in an entirely non-commercial way.

Gradually his book turns into a more political polemic attached to French history (eons back) and the recent political events (1871 and the French occupation in WW2, Algeria, modern emergence of fascism). An emerging theme is how much is left across the French countryside of WW2. We saw that in Calais and Brittany. Downie describes so much left of the Resistance (and Nazis’ atrocities) and so criss–crosses for me A French Village (and Come What May). It’s a pilgrimage, in which the French landscape seems to contain almost no one, they have to find taverns and even once stay in someone’s home, take chances, depend on themselves and other people. It put me in mind of Anne Radcliffe’s gothics at their spiritual landscape best. Colleen’s Paris (a blog reviewer) captures the book very well, telling you the details of the story too. Downie’s book is more genuinely worked out than Greene’s.

Both are a long distance from VS Naipaul’s masterpiece, The Enigma of Arrival (Salmon Rushdie finds it too sad), but they move in this direction of deep meditation in a landscape about the history of the place through what’s physically left there and what we can know (and in Naipaul’s case) dream deeply and re-create to make of himself (to the person) embedded in this foreign landscape — through his memories too. For Naipaul it’s the landscape around Stonehenge, as a strong antidote to the culture he was born in and has rejected. Karen Langley in her Kaggsy’s Ramblings writes of a lighter gay variant, Hugo Charteris’s Marching with April (introduced beautifully by Frederic Raphael), the writer and his family determine to leave London and takes root in an ancient place, the Highlands (out of his background) and attempt to build a new life: this time the Highlands. It will come after Downie’s Paris Paris, is lower on onw my night-table’a pile.

To be honest, I’m only half-way through Paris, Paris but I’m just loving it. One problem with many travel books is they fail to convey a deep sense of what it feels like to be in the place — Downie has this ability. Each area of Paris the reader is taken to, is fitted into a larger coherent picture of the city, and then itself explored visually, physically, and mentally. The photographs are beautifully done (black-and-white) and epitomize a mood, the kinds of history that occurred in the place and/or what is there now, the people he sees. I’ve been to Paris three times now, once long ago for 6 weeks on my own in a cold winter, and twice with Jim and Izzy, 2 weeks around Christmas time and the New Year (2000), and the following summer. I am learning more, getting a better feel of the place than I’ve ever done and think if I could go back how much more I’d benefit. Each chapter is a little Eleanor Clarke, Rome and a Villa. Each one forms a walking tour; you are exploring with him. A shorter review by Kirkus. Janet Hulstrand says rightly there is so much here of history, literature, art, that it’s almost impossible to capture in a couple of paragraphs, but I believe she comes near and regales us with the details evocatively.

Downie himself, talking in France, about the book. He begins slowly, and has trouble getting into contact with the audience but as he goes on he’s extraordinary: the romanticism of Paris is the result of its negativity, that it make each visitor invisible, and conveys amid its austere life suffering, time past, darker passions contained.

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

Hannelore Elsner as Nadja Uhi, with either one of the film’s younger actresses or perhaps the director? or costume maker?

I had confided in a friend how much I was again missing Jim this summer, and my friend recommended to me a 2008 German film, Cherry Blossoms, about an older man whose wife dies suddenly. I looked up the reviews and found most reviews to be vitriolically hostile or indifferent. For the record, I watched The Toyko Story and found it to be frozen, creepy, too long, too still, absurdly over-rated. The only parallels are the angry children and the deaths.

Cherry Blossoms opens with Nadja, the wife (a wonderful German actress, Hannelore Elsner) listening to doctor’s tell her that Rudi, her husband has not got long to live. She cries silently; they tell her to take him on a trip and she says he hates adventures. He follows the same narrow routine everyday of his life, including the sandwich she makes him for lunch. It would seem despite her staying home, being there for him all the time as he forges forth in the world, he stays within her sphere.

So no surprise when he follows her advice as she proposes a trip to visit their grown children in Berlin or some other German city (they live in a country town or suburb) and to the beach by a hotel. We see how much they do love one another, are dependent on one another, also glimpse the hostility to them of their grown children who slowly it’s revealed find their presence even so briefly an encumbrance, annoyance. Her favorite son lives far away in Tokyo — later we learn he moved there, that far to escape the domination of her quiet presence.

Quiet mood on a boardwalk; they move to the beach, by the shore, and suddenly she dies.

The film is half an hour in. The rest is Rudi’s very hard adjustment, then a chosen trip to Tokyo to see the son who fled them. At first he is bewildered and this son also hostile; they adjust to one another; he gets lost early on, but soon he is finding his way. Tokyo seemed to me as inhumane as I’ve thought it. The son says everyone works weekends, long days, all the time. They live in small boxes in high look-alike buildings, where everything looks the same. Their talk reveals that indeed the wife had always had this inexplicable desire to visit Japan, had wanted to be a Japanese stylized dancer. We have seen photos of her when young so dancing.

He has brought with him his wife’s clothes, at first he puts them on the bed beside him to sleep (what he started at home) but then he puts them on under his coat. He sees and then introduces himself to a street performer, Yu, an 18 year old girl who turns out to be homeless. She does a dance where she appears to get into contact with the dead; she says she is with her mother this way. She wears white make-up on her face — as the aborigine did in Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith as a sign he was willing to die, to let the whites murder him rather than flee them some more. He and she bond, form a friendship, she says she is an orphan and he suddenly cuts loose from this son (who has said he moved to Tokyo to get away from his mother who he loved so much but was overwhelming).

He takes the girl to Mount Fuji which his wife dreamed of going to. She dreamed of being a dancer, of going to Japan. He feels very badly that he stood in her way. We do see how middle class people in Japan take holidays: in a vast hotel-like structure where they live semi-communally — all eat in the same vast room. He and Yu are failing to see the Mount as each day it is so cloudy; and one morning he gets up very early and sees the mount: a vision. He hurries back, dresses in a Japanese dancing costume for a man that he has brought, and returns to the shore. As he dances, we see a hand reach his, and his wife is there, visible, similarly dressed. They dance intensely together. The camera moves away to Yu, just waking up. She discovers Rudi is gone, a couple of hours go by and he does not return. Now she too goes to the shore and finds him dead, laying by the shore. There follows a Japanese style funeral with his son and Yu presiding over his ashes in an urn, and then another funeral in Germany. The film ends quietly with the camera returning to the girl who has returned to the park to dance for money and to reach her mother. There is a dedication at the movie’s close, apparently by Dorrie remembering someone who perhaps died.

I use the phrase very moving so often, so let me say very very touching. Here is a review by Frederick and MaryAnn Brussat which begins to do the film justice. It’s beautifully tastefully filmed, written, the music just perfect, everything, tactful, controlled. I found it uplifting.

I do have one (many) regrets from my marriage: I never went to the shore or the beach with Jim enough. I knew how he burnt, and I’d get bored. Now I wish I had gone every summer with him — we’d go when we went to England to the Chitterings beach, once we went to Brighton. This summer I didn’t get to the shore at all. It is a three hour drive from my house to reach a public beach.

So these are the summer books and movies I have experienced this season of 2021; Nicolls at mid-summer and these at journey’s end.

Ellen

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A summer syllabus: OLLI at AU, Two novels of longing at two ends of an imperialist century

Haylet Atwell as Margaret Schlegel in HBO Howards End (scripted Kenneth Lonergan)

Anthony Hopkins as Mr Stevens and Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton in 1993 Remains of the Day (scripted by Harold Pinter, then revised Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala, 1993)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Days: Monday mornings, 11:45 am to 1:15 pm,
June 7 to 28,
4 sessions online, zoom meeting style (location of building: 4801 Massachusetts Ave, NW) 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Peppard Cottage used for Howards End in M-I-J 1993 (here it is not photographed in prettying up light) – the house in the novel is Rooksnest which Forster and his mother lived in for many years

Dyrham Park (South Gloucester) used for Darlington Hall in 1993 Remains of the Day

Description of Course: SG 1620 Summer 2021 Two novels of longing at two ends of an Imperialist century

The class will read as a diptych E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989). Both examine class, race, war, fascism and colonialism; family, sex, and property relationships from the “empire’s center,” England, from a post-colonial POV. The core center of both novels is the human needs of their characters against capitalist, gender- and class-based backgrounds. I urge people see on their own either or both the 1992 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film Howards End (w/Thompson & Hopkins) and 2015 HBO serial, Howards End (Kenneth Lonergan w/Atwell & Macfayden); and the 1993 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film The Remains of the Day (also w/Thompson & Hopkins). We can ask how ironic romances can teach us fundamental lessons about how to survive and thrive in today’s worlds.

Required Texts:

E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed Abinger Edition, introd, notes David Lodge. London: Penguin, 2000. ISBN 978-0-14-118231-1
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. NY: Knopf, 1989; or Vintage International, 1990. ISBN 978-06-7973172-1
There are readily available relatively inexpensive MP3CD sets of the Howards End read by Nadia May (Blackstone) and Remains of the Day by Simon Prebble (Tantor). Both are superb. A more expensive CD audio of Howards End by Colleen Prendergast. All unabridged.
All three movies (films? streaming videos?) are available on Amazon prime (small price for viewing or none at all).

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

June 7: Introduction: Forster, his life & other writing, Bloomsbury (kept short), Forster’s Howards End

June 14: Howards End and the 2 film adaptations

June 21: Transition from Howards End to The Remains of the Day

June 28: The Remains of the Day, the one film adaptation, and if time permits Ishiguro’s other novels (esp. A Pale View of the Hills, Never Let Me Go, When We Were Orphans) & 2 films made from Ishiguro’s books beyond what’s cited above, viz., The White Countess (Ishiguro wrote the screenplay) and Never Let Me Go.

Emma Thompson seen from afar as Miss Kenton, walking as much in the corridors of Mr Stevens’ mind as those of Darlington Hall (she also plays Margaret Schlegel in the 1993 Howards End)

Helena Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel (the younger sister, a Marianne Dashwood type) (1993 Howards End)

Outside reading or watching:

There is an enormous literature on Forster and he himself left a large body of writing. The best biography because it’s the one candid one about Forster’s sexual orientation and his life is Wendy Moffatt’s A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life by E.M. Forster NY: Farrar, Strauss, an Giroux, 2010. Then I recommend for the text and the rich backgrounds and criticism section, The Norton edition of Howards End, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, who brings together remarkable material both on and by Forster, and includes Forster’s “What I Believe” (central to understanding him and his relevance to us today). I’ll also sent as attachments or URLs: Barbara C. Morden, “Howards End and the condition of England,” May 2016, Literature 1900–1950, British Library, Oliver Tearle, “Revisiting Howards End: Notes towards an Analysis of Forster’s Novel, Interesting Literature, n.d; on the 4 part HBO film scripted by Lonergan, Roslyn Sulcras, “A Howards End: True to Then and Now, the New York Times, online: https://tinyurl.com/37s564xf. See also my blog on Howards End, book & movies.

There are many essays on Ishiguro, his novels, and especially The Remains of the Day (and not a few on the various films too), but many seem not to understand him or this and his other earlier seemingly realistic book (s) or to be beside the point — perhaps because the post-modern post-colonial perspective and Ishiguro’s mix of realism, symbolic allegory and surrealism, different genres and anti-realism (symbolism) gets in the way of understanding this particular story as told by the butler. I will send along Wroe, Nicholas, “Living Memories: Kazuo Ishiguro,” The Guardian (biography entries), 18 February 2005, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/19/fiction.kazuoishiguro …; Lee, Hermione, “Books & the Arts: Quiet Desolation,” The New Republic, 202 (January 1990):36-39; Deborah Guth, “Submerged Narratives in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day,” Modern Language Studies, 35:2 (1999):126-37; Meera Tamaya, Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day”: The Empire Strikes Back,” Modern Language Studies, 22:2 (Spring 1992):45-56. See also my blog on Remains of the Day, the book and movie. We’ll also use the fascinating online interview of Ishiguro at YouTube (TIFF Bell Lightbox for a post-screening discussion of the film adaptation of The Remains of the Day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1P6c3yomp0

Recommended for both books:   Jacqueline Banerjee’s Literary Surrey.  Hampshire:  John Owen Smith, 2005; and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Big House,” in her Collected Impressions. NY: Knopf, 1950.

Volumes of wonderful close readings of wonderful novels and discussions of issue include: Claude J Summers, E.M. Forster. NY: Ungar,1983; Barry Lewis and Sebastian Groes, Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Issues of the Novels. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. On Forster from the standpoint of all his writings: John Colmer, E.M. Forster: The Personal Voice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.

Hugh Grant as Lord Darlington’s nephew, young Mr Cardinal confronting Mr Stevens (1993 Remains of the Day)

Samuel West as Leonard Bast, wandering in a vision he has of a park he walks in (1993 Howards End)

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The Beiderbecke Affair/Tapes/Connection aka Trilogy

Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam), Mr Carter (Dudley Sutton), and Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) — in the school cafeteria (see Beiderbecke Affair for cast)

Jill: How many records do you have in your collection?
Trevor: No idea. Never counted. Maybe a thousand. Or two thousand. Plus a few tapes. [Takes some out to show her]
Jill: Thank you, I know what a tape looks like.
Trevor: Well, there’s a few tapes.
Jill: How many?
Trevor: No idea. Never counted. Maybe —

Best of all the pleasures on offer is the music, jazz themes that stay in your head long after you’ve watched, lingering like some Sondheim theme, and within the programs cheering, providing the beats, the pace, the meaning, part of the content of each episode (sometimes quite explicitly)

Friends and readers,

I was going to begin this fervent recommendation to stop all you are doing and obtain the three seasons of what we may call The Beiderbecke Trilogy, closely associated (for once) with the name of its wonderful script-writer, Alan Plater, with a paradoxical apology, admitting that the films are almost impossible to get and the books difficult too. Except tonight I have discovered they aren’t — as long as you have a working DVD player — or access to one. The books too are available at reasonable prices (showing just the Trilogy), if you don’t mind used paperbacks from Bookfinder.com

Little Norm (Danny Schiller), Jill and Big Al (Terence Rigby) — waiting to be interrogated by the police

I’ve been for the last month or more watching these seasons on and off, sometimes two episodes a night, sometimes one, together with a couple of hour-long documentary features about Plater: on The Beiderbecke Tapes DVD is Images of Yorkshire, all about Plater’s career writing for Yorkshire TV, with the man himself interviewed — and very interesting he was; on Fortunes of War, the 3 DVD set (Region 2), TimeShifts, a posthumous moving life-and-works beginning with his first play and carrying on to his last programs and books, emphasizing what he brought originally to TV: the real language of everyday England from all classes used by characters, and music integrated and used so that we remember the tunes and they stand for themes, ideas, characters distinctly. I wrote about Plater earlier this season (Hearing the Music) so will not repeat his biography nor signal accomplishments nor filmography (as it’s called). This is “just” to recommend Beiderbecke.

And it’s not easy to do unless you’ve seen the series or at least read the books. William Gallagher, a TV historian, journalist, critic, and dramatist in his own right captures the tones and tells the story of how the programs first emerged, the several process through which they were made, synopses of episodes, complete with representative witty dialogue, and assessments. Retelling the stories (see also Tapes and Connection), and saying they are gentle parodies of mystery/spy/thrillers. Gallagher says they combine prosaic quiet realisms with “the absurd,” but the better word is wacky — what literally happens is slightly and more wacky, versions of daily life turned askew so the underlying silly sudden contingent desperation of some of our behaviors lies open to view. This though sounds too stark (even if here and there the action skirts real danger, risk, threat) for the controlling mode is droll and the pace utterly leisured. This may be seen visually in the way repeated we see the two people get into the yellow van (old, battered, with signs from Jill’s campaigns) and go back and forth to their jobs or wherever they are going. No show today would waste such time with what’s “not needed.”

But we are perpetually in our cars too, with the sun in our eyes, we talk there to one another

It becomes a motif, a sort of symbol for the series

People also say (rightly) that for quite a while after the program is over you hear the strong jazz music (played by a band, with Frank Riccotti the composer). Remembering it you have in your head a kind of rhythm (this is what Sondheim achieves too in his best songs and musicals), the lingering effect.

No one ever hurries, there is no pile up of action, and no ratcheting up of tension, a kind of cumulative effect is felt but not so we really become anxious or stressed about anything. Part of this is the benignity, sanity, low expectations, & ironic distanced temperature of our central lovers (the term feels overdone), Trevor and Jill. When the building Trevor is living in to make way for a road (gov’t is not looked upon as having any common sense) is knocked down, Jill invites him to come live with her in a much less phony-looking house where she is first found (her aspiring ex-husband’s taste) as “probationary cohab.” They do love companionably, sentimentally, in friendship and duress, but they don’t romance. They approach love-making by first defining what are erogenous zones, then discussing further, and then the covers are pulled up or the light goes out. Two of the series (Tapes and Connection) end with our two high on a Yorkshire hill overlooking the dales, with the second by their side a cot for First-Born (their baby to whom they have not as yet given a name by the time the the third season ended

Feel the fresh breezes

With their first baby (first-born implies there may be more), to whom we hear Trevor tells tender stories to

Much is happening all the time, but it does not always lead to high melodramatic action (in fact there is little melodrama in the serials and when it does occur, say in Beiderbecke Tapes, you realize the series is straining); characters are thinking, deciding, doing things they need to do, becoming, helping one another or following some direction that is part of the story and itself issues in denouements that teach us or them something or other; we are learning a lot. Especially important are the many throw-away lines; typically the brilliant sudden intrusions of this or that ironical comment is spoken in a quick understated way. Why did the police arrest you? Trevor asks Jill. “I was intercepted with sealed envelopes from the Kremlin” is her quick quiet response. What else did you expect? Answers that go nowhere and are themselves filled with questions are what Jill and Trevor typically tell Mr Carter, their sceptical colleague, or the earnest imbecilic headmaster, Mr Wheeler (Keith Smith).

In one interview Plater says when he conceives a character, he or the character asks three questions which the action pursues: “who am I? How did I get here? What am I going to do tomorrow?”

They are supported by an inimitable cast, some of actors semi-famous, and others (to me) unknown (and perhaps never became BBC regulars). These are mostly variants in comedy, but when pushed move into semi-neurotic memories of unjust treatment. Terence Rigby as Al was told he was redundant so he set up a warehouse of goods in the basement of a church and sells them by having his “sister,” Janey (archetypical beautiful platinum blonde) go round neighborhoods with a thick catalogue. He was a major character actor at the time; not so Janey (Sue Jenkins) or Yvonne, the baby-sitter (Judy Brooke) who confesses a nagging deprivation leads her to steal:

Judy Brooke as Yvonne Fairweather.

I was delighted to re-find Maggie Jones as the pub-owner’s wife, Bella Atkinson (she was in the 1971 Sense and Sensibility, Mrs Quiverful in the 1982 Barchester Chronicles), Beryl Reid as Sylvia Jill’s old friend, companion in radical women’s circles (doubtless named for Sylvia Pankhurst, who was “consistent” we are told), now living in what seemed to be assisted living for disabled people and Jill’s confident and occasional advisor.

Jill with Sylvia who says she cannot understand why people think the old want to sit near ducks in ponds …

I recognized Eamon Boland as Jill’s errant and now petty criminal of an ex-husband when he appeared

Editorial use only
Eamon Boland as Peter Swinburne

The attentive reader will have realize the POV of this series is pro-labor, egalitarian, compassionate – – one of its pleasures for me — as all Plater’s original work and some of his choices (J. B. Priestley’s Good Companions) reveals. This goes along with having central low status characters (whose actors are not name people) make wry comments and play major roles: in the Beiderbecke Affair, it is “the [nameless] man with a dog called Jason” (Keith Marsh) who remarks there are no neighborhoods, no neighbors any more, who snitches to the police for money; the Chief Superintendent Forrest (a star elsewhere, Colin Blakely) an ultimate crook; and a very funny over-enthusiastic (half-mad) Sgt Hobson (Dominic Jepcott) trying so hard (he gets a Ph.D, but cannot think outside his script

Dominic Jephcott as DS Hudson and Terence Rigby as Big Al — the Sergeant scrambling about over rocks is described by “the man with the dog called Jason” as “having a bit of a crawl” as he watches him

I also so enjoyed all the shots of Yorkshire: not just the countryside, but typical and real streets, compounds of houses — I lived there for over 2 years, and was very happy with Jim — euphoric in the first months of our marriage.

In one of the semi-wacky sequences Jill and Trevor deliver a man who seems to be a Polish refugee to the Lancashire border because they cannot get him to the Mexican one — you can see here the casual continual photographing of Northern England

I did assume the books must be inferior; they were written after the series aired but are not simply novelizations. The stories differ somewhat; there is a real attempt to use the narrator, to have appealing effective description, pace, subjectivity, but what really makes them an equivalent reminder, substitute let’s say on a train, or bus, is Plater has recreated the tone of the series — the same wry undercutting wit, ironies, crisp dialogue whose words surprise you — there is poetry in Plater’s language. My copy is a many times read book.

So far from having to apologize for recommending something the reader will not be able to access, I’ve discovered the cult that arose at the time (over five years, for there were breaks in the seasons — not all the people high in the BBC believed in this program’s ability to attract viewers), is not gone altogether. The show is remembered and people are still buying and watching it. Barbara Flynn is not the only one of the actors and other professionals involved who remembers the experience with real fondness and pride. She supplied most of the photos in Gallagher’s book

This seem to be an ad for Britbox (a subscription site on the Internet where you might be able to see the serial): they have chosen to show hero and heroine in Amsterdam (Beiderbecke Tapes goes to Amsterdam and Edinburgh)

Ellen

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Christian Carion’s Come What May — an elegiac anti-war film centering on the refugee experience

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 …)

Ellen

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On Surviving Fascism: Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi), & Carlo Levi

Cover illustration: an image of a painting by Felice Casorati, a favorite painter of Natalia’s (whom her father presented as a not-so-comic tyrant then naturally abhors)

Of one of the Nazi functionaries Levi meets in Periodic Table, he writes: “, “è nostro dovere giudicarlo, non perdonarlo” [it is our duty to judge him, not forgive him].

Prison Box: Inventory (Rome, February 1944)

copy War and Peace
cyrillic type
(fading, spine bent)

cashmere scarf,
arm length
(dirty, white, torn)

photographs of a girl,
two boys
and a woman (frayed at the edges)

pencil stubs
(carbon
tips spent)

lined spiral notebook
(nine pages left,
yellowed, blank)

pair of wire-rimmed glasses
(left lens shattered,
nose support gone)

— from Peg Boyers’ Hard Bread, a poetic autobiography for Natalia, this poem the imagined box of things she could have gotten after her husband, Leone, had been tortured to death

“See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” — Faustus, in Christopher Marlowe’s play

Gentle readers and friends,

Perhaps not altogether by chance, I’ve been reading a series of Northern Italian and Jewish writers tragically directly relevant to what is happening in the US and elsewhere today — slowly before our very eyes, keeping at this point millions of people quarantined at home with no testing for said virus, or humane exit plan (except death for millions). This in a course I’m taking with Judith Plotz at the OLLI at AU (as after all she picked the books and authors); most of them written between the mid-1930s and not long after WW2; you see the assigned books above. I’ve not been content with these, but added to them Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues (with her rightly much admired “Winter in Abruzzi”), a book of essays on her and Peg Boyer’s extraordinarily good recreation of her autobiography; I went back to Primo Levi’s If this be man and The Truce (which I read in Italian in the early 1990s), about If not now, when?, and Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom, in William Weaver’s Open City (an account of his relationship with post-war writers in Rome (these three and Ignazione Silone, Alberto Moravio, Elsa Morante).

I cannot recommend them too strongly —

The longer texts assigned were all ultimately forms of life-writing. In The Periodic Table Primo Levi retells his life through a series of ironic essay-stories which take their immediate inspiration from 21 different chemical elements, each of which allows him to tell of aspects of his life more or less chronologically, as boy and man in Northern Italy, before, during and after WW2, often seen from the aspect of him practicing his profession as a chemical engineer (this helped save him from death in the extermination camps). We meet his family, friends (Sandro and Rita who help him resist fascist culture), people he loved, whimsical utopian dreams, and (in one case) now exposes for committing without ever with understanding or acknowledging the evil enacted. We are led to see how central to our lives is chemistry. Personal stories filled with life’s troubles, philosophical reflections, whimsical irrational doings, often intertwined with his sense of an imposed alienation and stigmatizing as a Jew lead to our seeing a collective experience of humiliation and oppression lightly presented. Unusual and elusive accounts of life in a laboratory or chemist’s shop often ending in a characteristic sobering gesture. I liked especially the individual scenes, with their unexpected turns. This is a kind book by a kind man who has endured much.

Primo Levi at the New York Public Library

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings (another translation of the book’s title) feels de-centered: she hardly ever gives us her or her family’s thoughts hidden from the collective outward life; the anecdotes are mostly about others, with her as the quietly presiding POV. Yet the book is about her life, starting with the time she has consecutive memories at age 5 to near the end of her life when she visited England with her second husband, and now somehow freed of her immediate Italian world can spill out what happened the intimate events and calamities inflicted on her family and close friends and associates as well as their relationships, achievements, losses. Family sayings are repeated phrases, words, sentences that the family uses as collective comic glue for themselves. And we can track them (as they add and subtract people) from one place to another as they move around Italy, or are forced to move, hide, become imprisoned, escape (her brother swam across a part of the Mediterranean in winter to reach unoccupied France). Part of the reason for her reticence is this is a memoir, all the people are real, and the events really happened, so she must protect them and herself. I suggest frustration at this led Boyers to write the feelings and thoughts we do surmise (we are given enough to extrapolate) in poems that give Natalia’s repressed reactions and only partly expressed critiques and celebrations full play. I loved her plain matter-of-fact style: simple sentences expect us to provide in-depth understanding as when she says of Jewish and other displaced now vulnerable peoples they are “without a country.” While the surface is prosaic, quietly telling about all sorts of interesting people (many involved in politics and literature), the underlying pattern is tragic. Boyers calls her style and tone “astringent yet passionate.” The refrain: I never saw him again (of her husband); they never saw one another again. Like Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room, she produces a portrait of humanity as seen through the lens of a personal rich Italian secular-Jewish culture — during a time of aggressive fascism.

Natalia Ginzburg

One of the unexpected pleasures of Boyers’ poems is that in elaborating, imagining Ginzburg’s relationships to a number of Italian writers mentioned and central to her book (e.g., Pavese), we get close to these.

Peg Boyers reading her poetry

Christ Stopped at Eboli is more than a poetic masterpiece; it is a political argument and ethnographic study. It covers the year he spent in internal exile — a peculiarly Italian form of imprisonment descending from the Roman period, where a person is cut off, exiled from his or her community, isolated in a remote spot and watched to keep him or her from any kind of political activity, news of the world he or she understands. (A number of the Jewish and socialist/communist literati in Italy were treated this way: Ginzburg’s memoir includes a couple of years in Abruzzi.) Carlo Levi may be said to have thoroughly internalized his exterior culture — he acts as physician (he was trained to be a doctor), paints (his vocation), writes, joins in tangentially — which culture during his sojourn expands to sympathize with these strange and victimized (for centuries) people he finds himself among, whom since the Northerners know little of them, he is determined to bring before the world of his readers (the book was written in 1946 after Mussolini fell from power). I think his conclusion that these people live in a timeless realm they cannot be plucked from wrong: they have been given no opportunity, no good choices (like the working class whites of the US), exploited by every group that has taken power over them, and the result has been seething just repressed destructive violence. (The lesson for our era is more direct in Carlo Levi’s book’s conclusions than the above books.) He compels our attention by the riveted and insightful nature of the chronological settling in and living alongside story he tells. His sister visits him at one point, and we see this world from her experienced sophisticated compassionate eyes.

Carlo Levi

Late in life both Carlo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg became directly politically involved, both as independents in the parliament with ties to the socialist parties. They wrote journalism, she worked for Einaudi all her life. Both seem to have been known by other much respected writers and artists — from Croce to Pavese and Elsa Morante. It is a small and elite world these people belong to, but one with a pro-social democracy tradition – now under threat too.

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Movie poster

I’ve now begun the fourth author for this term, Giorgio Bassani whose Garden of the Finzi-Continis (I have the Isabel Quigly translation) has some wider fame because there was a popular movie adapted from the book. I began this autobiographical novel after reading an apparently famous meditation: “A Memorial Tablet in the Via Mazzini.” He differs from the other three by his name (no Levi), because he comes from Ferrara (the others Turin and Rome), and because his tale is of fascists. This epitomizes one of Bassani’s central themes: the moral problem of assimilation. A man whose has suffered unspeakably from the camps and seen so many friends worked to death, outright killed (probably raped — this is only very recently recorded as on Marta Hiller’s A Woman in Berlin) sees his name as having died on a memorial plaque on a wall where there was once a synagogue. He wants to inform all that he is still living, but they are willing (good of them) to acknowledge the mistake and seemingly welcome him back, seemingly sorry for all that has happened, in fact they want him to be silent about what happened, to enable their own forgetting of the roles they played in betraying neighbors, often enough taking their furniture, their things, their property, their positions. It seems to be his moral duty to assimilate in the way demanded in order that the society can return to functioning. But is it? What happens is the one survivor refuses to pretend nothing happened, refuses to forget, demands his house and furniture back. And we see that the others (outright fascists and those who supported the fascists) want to return to the status quo that favored them after the war as well as before. They want to carry on wearing fascist costumes, acting like fascists (the partisans with their machine guns are behaving like fascists).

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis seems to be about how uUnlike the Levis in Turn), Bassani’s family in Ferrara, surrounded by fascists and sometimes fascists themselves, were not aware that they could and would be destroyed — they thought their insulated wealth protected them. This naivete is found in Olivia Manning’s depiction of a wealthy Jewish family in Bucharest in her Balkan Trilogy: with what ease the father is imprisoned, personally crushed, his property taken from his family whose best option is flight (if they can manage it).

Giorgio Bassani

The relevance here works a little differently. With the increased monopolization of all trade by a few giant corporations, the film has become one of these unaffordable super-expensive DVDS, no longer on Prime Video on Amazon (gradually such films are being removed) and available only as a blu-ray, merely now very high-priced. A 4 part film of Christ Stopped at Eboli is available only in Italian (as who would get a profit from this, so why provide translations) and at astronomical prices.

While I have my own long-time favorites in Italian poetry from the Renaissance and again the later 19th century to our own time, I’ve been introduced to new poets I hadn’t read or known about. Bassani’s style in his novel seems to be long sinewy sentences moving back and forth in time, drenched with an edgy-raw sort of nostalgia, but here is a poem by him where the emphasis falls on the here and now. The problem is what do you do when fascistic groups have taken over the land you live in and are working to do all they can to impoverish (so as to enrichen themselves) and terrify you into submission. (I cannot reprint the stanzaic form, which you can see here.)

The Racial Laws

The magnolia smack in the middle
of our Ferrara house’s garden is the very
same that reappears in almost every
book of mine

We planted it in’39
ceremoniously
just a few months after
the Racial Laws were brought to bear
it was a solemn-comical affair all of us
fairly lighthearted God permitting despite
being encumbered with the dull historical appendix
Judaism

Walled-in by four walls forewarned
Soon enough it grew
black luminous wide-rimmed
pointing decisively up towards the imminent
sky
full day
and night with grey
sparrows dusky blackbirds
unflaggingly scanned from below by pregnant
cats and by my
mother—
she too confined defenceless behind
the windowsill forever brimming
with her crumbs

Straight as a sword from its base to its tip
twenty-some years on
it overtops the neighboring roofs
beholding every bit of the city and the infinite
green space that circles it
but now somehow stumped I can guess
how it feels unsure
of a stretch up there in the heights a narrow space
in the sun
like someone at a loss
after a long journey
as to which road to take or
what to do
— Giorgio Bassani, tr. James McKendrick

Felice Casorati — untitled

Ellen

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Pandemic: Angela Merkel’s speech to the German people — leading by example & a Corona map; some Gilbert & Sullivan cheer, an absorbing movie series & book

How she looks while you are watching.

Dear friends,

I usually reserve this space for cultural events, talk or writing about books, movies, theater, operas, concerts, visual art, but I thought I’d break my self-control or habit/convention here, and offer a URL to Angela Merkel’s speech to the German people — and by extension as it was put onto the Internet with translations into other languages than German. For us living in the US (and people in the UK too), there is nothing like this from anyone with authority or power to make the words operative for us. In the US all we have has from POTUS is more lies about himself (now he knew about the pandemic before anyone else) and more attempts to hurt the American people and anyone else living on the landmass of the US (to say nothing of those he can affect outside it). I don’t know if you can reach this — I hope so — that it is translated if you do not understand German. I heard the German with an over-voice of English, so I heard her tones.

I found it terribly moving, the kind of thing so moving that (as Scott said of one of Johnson’s poems) you don’t cry: Angela Merkel speaking to the German people. I do feel bitter shame that there is probably not one person in the US who could have spoken like this and has no chance whatsoever:

https://www.dw.com/en/merkel-coronavirus-is-germanys-greatest-challenge-since-world-war-two/a-52830797

Here is a further explanation

I accompany this with a URL to the John Hopkins’ Corona Site

Thus far three of the four courses at an Oscher Institute of Lifelong Learning attached to American University that I was set to teach (one) and take (two) are cancelled or probably so; the same one (The Novels of E.M. Forster) I’ve cancelled at the OLLI at Mason. I cannot do Zoom and remote access; not simple or easy, it’s a complicated difficult process as teacher, & beyond me without a lot of training in my house, someone sitting next to me. For my style of teaching, I would not be able to transfer what I can do face-to-face, in a room where all the people are together, so all equally there, participating potentially and actually, with nothing recorded. My younger daughter who lives with me will by Tuesday be working from home (teleworking) at her job as a librarian: she is learning how and on Tuesday a laptop will be brought to her from where she works and she will link in through that.

I wrote about the pandemic from an autobiographical stance. I have been reporting (sending what I consider important information and essays and or videos (Sanders’ fireside chat) perhaps overlooked by mainstream and other media, for example when Trump and his cronies tried to buy a German company working at producing a vaccine to create a monopoly for himself (then he said it was the US) so he could grow rich and/or weaponize the virus and vaccine; or when he for weeks denied the seriousness of the pandemic situation (falsifying analogies).

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How to comfort and strength ourselves individually and within our own circles of companions? Humor, an absorbing sincere intelligent movie or movie-series, reading (of course), writing or what you do that you value as an occupation (hobby, or a vocational endeavour). So I leave you for today with an example I hope of each: a little Gilbert and Sullivan cheer:

I am the very model of effective social distancing!
I listen to the experts on the topic of resistance-ing;
I know that brunch and yoga class aren’t nearly as imperative
As doing what I can to change the nation’s viral narrative.

I’m very well acquainted, too, with living solitarily
And confident that everyone can do it temporarily:
Go take a walk, or ride a bike, or dig into an unread book;
Avoid the bars and restaurants and carry out, or learn to cook.

There’s lots of stuff to watch online while keeping safe from sinus ills
(In this case, it’s far better to enjoy your Netflix MINUS chills)!
Adopt a pet, compose a ballad, write some earnest doggerel,
And help demolish Trump before our next event inaugural.

Pandemics are alarming, but they aren’t insurmountable
If everybody pitches in to hold ourselves accountable.
In short, please do your part to practice prudent co-existence-ing,
And be the very model of effective social distancing!
— Eliza Rubenstein (rated)

For fun in the unlikely event that you’ve never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta? “A Modern Major General” from The Pirates of Penzance:

A modern version: Tom Lehrer on the Periodic Table:

“A Policeman’s Lot is Not a Happy One” — the patter expressed as dancing, another production of The Pirates of Penzance:

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A still from the first episode

Try Un Village Francois: a friend characterized it accurately thus: “a fictional treatment of the Nazi occupation of a village in France. It speaks to our present struggles to cope with the latest version of ethno-nationalism/fascism [here in the US]. Many many movies in this realm but this stood out for me because of its sincerity , brilliant acting, and intelligence.” It is available on Amazon Prime (if you are member) or maybe bought (from Amazon again) as 5 seasons of DVDs

We see and experience what occupation means when several groups of Nazi troops come in, take over a village: it begins with planes appear over the village dropping bombs, and then troops come in fully armed, preventing freedom of movement, immediately instituting all sorts of (often absurd unrealizable) demands o people to teach them to obey but also to take from them all their wealth, many of their places to live in, to meet others in — achieved by implacable bullying backed up by indiscriminate and spiteful killing.

From the 2nd episode of 18, the individual characters and family groups begin to emerge, the two central male protagonists are a doctor in the village and a Jewish businessman. The mayor has fled. The doctor’s wife is childless and in this episode manages to rescue a fragile infant whose mother died giving birth to it — the baby was in danger of a jealous nun insisting on putting it into an orphanage where it would die. The doctor is a magnificent ordinary man who acts decently and courageously and sensibly and helps organize the villagers but is helpless against the ruthless brutality of the Nazis who just murder indiscriminately. The Jewish businessman’s wife thinks very well of herself and is suing the school for being responsible for some hurt her child received – not dead and it is an attack in effect on the teacher. He maneuvers to gain access to a single woman who is working temporarily as a nurse, she is married, her husband away and we see them making love after he has pursued her by a bridge. We see him drawn into collaboration with the Germans, agreeing to use his wood-making business to make objects for them, in return for favorable treatment (like a pass across a bridge).

What is important is the atmosphere and to see how social and gov’t structures just collapse under a fascistic and militaristic onslaught. We who live in fear that Trump will postpone the coming election and get away with it as another step in the direction of the lives of these victimized French villagers have a parable for our times before us. We experience the hidden lives of people like ourselves. It is inspiriting to watch how these people cope.

The poster for the series: To live is to make your choices

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C.S. Lewis came to mind as I watched: from his Epilogue to An Experiment in Criticism. “…we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. …. The secondary impulse [of each person] is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.” … “This … is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos [something said]; it admits us to experiences other than our own.” (139) “Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors.” (pp 137-40). Lewis does not imagined experience need be autobiographically true on the author’s part; the good reader is not seeking to learn about the author in any direct way, but to see the world as he or she saw it ..

Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), Episode 4 (Wolf Hall)

Of course he is speaking of books (but such a movie functions as books too) so (I suggest only if you’ve read the first two volumes) hunkering down with Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light.

As it opens, after the initial sense of groups of lethal Catholics at bay for Cromwell’s head, the narrative switches to Cromwell’s trying to carve out some space for the king to operate in calm and legitimately. To do that Henry VIII must be regarded as legitimate (still not a matter of course by any means), have legitimate heirs who can take over: Richmond, the illegitimate son, fatuous, mean-minded; or the disabled half-crazed Mary who yet has an integrity attached to her religion and affections; “he, Cromwell” must deal with an unstable distrustful and now openly murderous king. Threaded through all this Cromwell’s re-lived memories of the hideous executions that ended Bring Up the Body. I love the return to the characters who love Cromwell, Rafe, his wife, Helen, Cromwell’s nephew, Richard, the people in his household still alive. It is Rafe who persuades Mary Tudor to sign a document saying she will accede to the idea her mother was not married to her father, and Henry is the head of the state and a new church. A friend reading with me quipped when our computers seemed to go awry at the word “epidemic” that what we need in our state today is a Cromwell at the head, and Rafe his Man Friday

I [Cromwell-like] want to grab a quill, write something, and hand it off to Rafe. “Deliver this at once, Rafe. ‘Wait for an answer.'”

I’ve never seen a historical fiction lean so heavily on the knowledge of the reader of the ending and what happens for a couple of decades afterward. Elizabeth as a baby is constantly described as grotesque, fat, absurd ginger hair, useless to anyone but Lady Bryan who took care of Henry’s children after he rid himself of Catherine and would not let Mary stay with her and executed Anne; all the while we know that Elizabeth grew to be an able wonderful leader. The book is also profoundly anti-Catholic as profoundly against atavastic thinking and cruel tyrannies (mirroring 2020).

It’s another haunted book: Cromwell now carries with him in his mind and among his material objects his remembered wife, Liz, of course Wolsey, others; at the same time, it’s hard to get into, the erudition in effect expected of you is enormous: the people at an event know why Henry’s sister, Margaret Tudor’s daughter, Meg aka Margaret Douglas, is there to carry Jane Seymour’s train, but we cannot get the jokes unless we know, for example, that (to us a minor historical figure) Margaret Tudor married more than one man, who she went to bed with, whose child Meg is, because Margaret’s heirs (outside Meg who is probably illegitimate) are rivals to Henry (Mary Queens of Scots is her grand-daughter & Meg’s niece).

Colin Burrows (in London Review of Books, alas behind a paywall) has again understood Mantel and here the problems of his magnificent book, which is attempting to mirror our own deeply threatened uneasy time. From Burrow’s review:

These darkening memories make it seem as though the unenactable revenge plot against Henry has been driven underground and become a process of internal retribution, in which Cromwell’s own memories make him come to see himself as the brutal king that historians once believed him to be. When he is finally imprisoned in the Tower, these memories become ghosts who visit him as he waits to die … The episode of Margaret Douglas’s bethrothal also allows Mantel to play some of the elegant games with historical sources which have been one of the less obvious pleasures of this series. Thomas Howard [a new character in the series] wrote several love poems to Margaret Douglas, and she wrote some in return. These survive in the Devonshire Manuscript, a poetic miscellany gathered and curated by a group of women at the Henrican court (Mary Shelton, Mantel writes, ‘was clerk of the poetry book). Howard’s inept versification becomes a running joke.

We will need another movie series to realize the book fully — for it cries out for that, depends on our memories of the movie or stage play. I hope all the wonderful actors who were in Wolf Hall will return.

The lovely cover of the British edition and a limited 300 copies signed by Mantel (Herself!)

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So, to my gentle readers, stay in, wash your hands, try to stay well, do what you can to back leaders who will do something effective to help you with for your possible insolvency and medical bills, don’t let irrational fear drive you into hoarding any items you see in the supermarket which strike you as non-perishable — and find what pleasure and uplift and meaning in life you can during this time of social distancing (and all this will cost us individually) for the good of us all …

Us by Olga Pastuchiv, cover illustration for Fe-Lines: French Cat Poems through the Ages

Ellen

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E.M. Forster’s Maurice, perhaps the finest of the novels, with a few words on the Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation

James Wilby as Maurice in an early phase of the film — “Come on [out],” he shouts

Hugh Grant as Clive in the last scene, closing the window shutters on the world (1987 Merchant-Ivory Maurice)

James Ivory: The problem of living honestly with one’s emotions will be with us, I guess, as long as people make films, write plays, or write novels.

Forster: The pack were turning on Helen to deny her human rights, and it seemed to Margaret that all the Schlegels were threatened with her. Were they normal? What a question to ask? (the impassioned Margaret defending Helen at the end of Howards End)

Dear friends and readers,

This week I have been just immersing myself in E.M. Forster, rereading his brilliant and useful Aspects of the Novel, finishing the astonishing Room with a View, and about one-quarter the way through once again the inexhaustible Howards End, listening in my car to Sam Castor reading A Passage to India read aloud by Sam Dastor. Also one-third the way through Nicola Beauman’s Morgan and finding P.N Furbank’s magisterial biography a great help. She must be mad, my reader is thinking. No no. I’m reading and watching other books & movies too, and have even done other stuff, but this is what has most mattered this week. It’s all partly with a view to teaching Forster starting in less than two weeks, to two classes and I don’t want to let anyone down. I agree with Beauman this far: that Forster wrote at least four of the greatest novels in the English language. One of these four that has not got its due is Maurice.

As everyone who has read with attention the slightest about Forster or his books knows, Forster wrote Maurice in 1913-14, but did not allow it to be published until after his death in 1971. Why? it is an open exploration of homosexuality as experienced in a rabidly homophobic society, perhaps the first one in modern times not to keep the themes and insights to a hidden subtext. Maurice is a beautiful story, partly about the growing up into adulthood and then fulfillment of Maurice Hall, his discovery of his homosexuality, his suffering over how he is led to repress his nature, the slow realization in him of how perverse, destructive, unjust, cruel this is, and a final breaking out into joy (the book has a happy, indeed ecstatic ending) when he throws off the bonds of self-castigation, punishment and finds deep companionable and physical fulfillment with a man he loves. There are two parallel main stories intertwined with Maurice’s:

Clive Durham, Maurice’s equal in status, but seemingly much more intelligent, intellectual and who early on in the book seems aware he is homosexual and to be inviting Maurice to become a friend and sexual partner, but about 2/3s or less the way through turns on himself as well as Maurice, and with strong repression, marries an upper class wealthy conventional young woman, Anne, doing everything he can to live a controlled chaste heterosexual life.

Rupert Graves as Scudder upon first seeing Maurice

Alec Scudder, a servant, gardener, gamekeeper, stable man in Maurice’s employ, who also is aware of his homosexuality (he seems actually to be bisexual) and who awakens Maurice once again, but who seems to be about to live a false life also in order to find employment with his family abroad, but is convinced by Maurice to take the risks they will together (Maurice has some money) to live together in quiet retreat ….

The novel shares a number of central themes with A Room with a View and Howards End. As Claude Summers put this in his fine close reading study of all Forster’s novels, this is the necessity (if we are to know health itself) of following our innermost nature in choosing a mate and an occupation for life; one may have to make some compromises, but they must not be the erasure of humanistic values, which comes from our finest selves and sexual natures, which all his books endorse when these are aligned with humaneness, an appreciation of the beautiful in the arts, complete respect for other people & so on. I know in reading Maurice I bonded deeply with him and many of the experiences he has I recognized myself as having had — one does not need to have the same sexual orientation to experience loneliness, injustice, ostracizing, nervous self-doubt and a host of other experiences Maurice goes through — as do numbers of Forster’s characters in his other novels. Forster is like this: his generalization stance picks up all human beings so when (for example) Aziz is treated with immense bigotry, his subjective terror, anxiety, and eventually bitterness could be that of a black person in the United States — or any white supremacist society.

It is course not just these themes and insights but the way they are plotted, given life through the characters, points of view, rich settings, and eloquent language that makes for these books as masterpiece, with (I think) Maurice the most fully articulated and resolved.

Lest anyone think I am exaggerating or that Forster was far too careful, for he stopped writing novels altogether about ten years after Maurice, presumably (and this has been demonstrably argued) because he found it so frustrating not be be able to present the world as he saw it and experienced it — as an LBGTQ man (as we might nowadays label him) – just look at the reactions to his book in 1971. He was not imprisoned, tortured or hung, but the reception of the books by critics was mostly hostility, denigration, or dismissal. Cynthia Oznick (“disingenuous, infantile”), Steiner (“narrow, embittered”) were typical. Much has changed since then, but still Maurice is less valued than A Passage to India when both are equally profound protest literature.

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A group of us, varying from five to six and down to two each week wrote to TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io about the book as we read it together over four weeks, emphasizing now this theme or that character, or this or that passage, or some of the differences with the movie. I can record only a little of all this in a blog.

Part One. The first five chapters comprise a coming-of-age story, with the homosexuality of the book presented openly to us. We see Maurice as a boy in an early stage of resistance as an early seeking of himself and self-definition. The headmasters, bullying teachers, seeming half-crazed doctor-psychiatrists throughout this book, they are sent up or abhorrent. One can only flee them. Towards the ending of the part (Chapters 8-11)

I tended to “blame” Clive for turning himself (willing it) into a heterosexual male by living a strictly heterosexual life, rigidly exerting self-control, but the turning point came when after a long relationship building, and a home-coming where Maurice, having in his strong emotional responsiveness begins physically to respond to Clive’s physical overtures, prompting Clive’s daring intuitive “I love you.” It’s Maurice’a raw rough shocked horrified response that drives Clive into a reactive retreat — we will see from the outside at least — forever.

I so felt for both of them. I felt for Maurice when he stood outside before leaving for home and missed his opportunity — the kind of thing that remains so unseen and is so crucial for our lives. Then when Maurice makes the mistake of courting Miss Olcott (a play upon Alcott?) and she is so turned off; no matter what he does, it’s wrong. I’m not homosexual but this sort of thing happens to me too often: I don’t know what I did wrong, worse, I don’t know what the other person is expecting but see I am not doing it (this in job’s interviews). Here’s it’s meant a physical repulsion but Maurice also misreads signals; he does this for the rest of the novel.

Then the three short hopeless but continued attempts on the part of Maurice who the shock of Clive’s statement, rejection and this time home has at last awakened. As Clive will now be forever shut off from a physical life fulfillment, so Maurice is at long last open to it and recognizes how he has been living lies. This is the meaning of the chapter which begins “After this crisis, Maurice became a man.” I omit the religious backdrop, some of which is meant to be satiric.

For Part Two:

I find in these chapters powerful comprehensible beauty — Clive and Maurice managed a real relationship, which seems to be all the more fulfilling idealistically because (I think this is clear) it does not include full physical sex. Forster makes it clear that soul meets soul, and they speak with utter sincerity insofar as they understand themselves and one another. There are remarks about Maurice regretting this like “he was too young to detect the triviality of contact for contact’s sake” – the perfect day is the one spent outdoors in the landscape together. They have the “first taste of honesty” with one another; or because there is no acceptable set of conventions, they are not overawed by poetic traditions and all the more in contact with real eternal emotions.

At the same time we see no one but them is openly sympathetic, and many either don’t see they are lovers (in effect) or pretend not to see; worse, when pushed, or prodded, everyone is hostile. So Maurice is sent down — had he been a girl the headmaster Cornwallis would not have been adamant. Maurice’s family does not appreciate the way he tyrannizes; Clive’s family have no sympathy with Clive’s intellectuality or anything individual about him. He should not go up for a fourth year because that is not of use to the functions and roles he must play as a country squire. It does seem the mother thinks that Maurice knows which girl Clive is involved in instead of seeing the lover is Clive himself.

None of them appear to need a degree for money: Maurice goes into the family business; Clive is to take over the property and all that means.

So many good insights into our hidden lives: Like “books meant so much to” Clive “He forgot they were a bewilderment to others.” For me I can’t understand anyone who cannot or does not read regularly; I can understand because I’ve seen too often people to whom a book’s meaning and function in any deep sense is a bewilderment. Supposedly this is Maurice. Also that Maurice when he tries to make up does not realize that Clive is now in another place, that three months of experience have now been prompted by his remark so that Clive is changed.

Forster values Clive highly: calls him “a well tempered soul” and says “dignity and richness” are “poured into” Clive’s soul, that “there was nothing humble about Clive.’ Forster admires this too — I am remembering his ambivalence towards Bast. When we meet Alec Scudder we find he is not humble in himself either; it’s just an act put on — like heterosexuality is.

Part Three was very moving, and I felt that the intense deprivation Maurice feels, his desire to kill himself, suggests that there was a physical as well as emotional relationship between Maurice and Clive otherwise this really physical revulsion against himself would not have enough basis. He is just so lonely not to have a full partner physically as well as emotionally.

It creates sympathy for Maurice and to my mind makes sense that he (paradoxically) is beginning to become a better person. Suffering does not do that to all people, but it does to Maurice, he softens, he begins to feel for others and is more flexible. He also at the same time is inwardly bitter as he sees he will not be understood by anyone he meets (unless of course it’s another gay man who opens up to him but he dare not). He is so frustrated and angry he wishes he had shouted out they were homosexual when Clive first told him. He’d then have “smashed down the lies.” He feels lies are imprisoning him.

But another awakening: a young male relative from school arouses Maurice’s intense desire for sexual congress. What’ s interesting is the boy wordlessly understands and would have said yes, or okay, but Maurice fears maybe not. Maybe the boy would have responded the way he did to Clive in the first place. So Maurice locks himself in — this the second time he locks himself in a room to control himself.

I’m skipping a lot, like Maurice’s grandfather’s death, his tyrannical relationship with the women in his family, Clive’s travels

How far is Alec a stereotype: in this third part I’d say we don’t get to see enough of him. He is kept in the shadows; we hear his conversation only after we have been told he was the gamekeeper who went out with Maurice and Archie on the imbecilic cruel tasks of murdering rabbits and birds. I love Forster for bringing out how all they did (including arguing over whose fault it was they didn’t kill more animals) was senseless as well as a waste of time and some other creature’s life. Only gradually are we aware that the gamekeeper is hanging about, and our first knowledge of him as an individual is as a truculent lower class person. His class resentment is real, believable and continues to the end of the novel. He wants more than 5 bob, but then he cringes — he has been taught he is inferior and kept from gaining good English and polished manners. He is there as corduroys that Maurice feels press at him out in the landscape. Towards the end of chapter 37, memories pile up, Maurice feels some sort of electric current and at the close suddenly Alec is there in the bedroom, saying “Sir, I know …. I know ….” We are told he is said to be cleverer than the kind of gamekeeper they used to have. Throughout the book there are males who hover in the background and seem to know Maurice is gay or they are, try to make contact and either do, disastrously, or don’t. Alec has had courage or nerve and determination none of the others had.

The last or fourth part. I thought about how difficult it is for Alec and Maurice to get together and really see the other accepts them — how in the next chapters they stumble and almost miss one another forever — well I think that can happen if the other person doesn’t sudden speak out and break through the social barriers set up. There’s more than that to fear here — like blackmail; Maurice could also hurt Alec by getting him blackballed from any position ever after.

I also was so afraid when Maurice went once more to Clive: fearful Clive would “intervene” and try to stop them — out if unacknowledged jealousy?

Also I wanted to say that in my own experience you can defy the world – I had a number of people tell me not to marry Jim and express shock at what I was doing. He made no money, had no prospects of any just then. There was no one at our marriage but his parents who didn’t approve. We didn’t have to hide our love or relationship but it didn’t do us any good — it was more like what Graham describes in his first Poldark novel when Ross defies the world and marries his kitchen maid.

Forster had the example of Edward Carpenter and his partner Merrill who were living together very quietly — neither had a big money-making job at all — you do have to give up some things and not regret this and keep to not regretting it. In the 3rd season of the Durrells when Corfu is being taken over by a fascist regime, Sven the open homosexual is put in jail for a while; this being a Utopian kind of series, our friends the Durrells manage to free him — but part of his liberty like Carpenter’s is he lives a s self-dependent farmer away from others.

You ‘just’ have to be willing to pay the price of your decision — we are not told that Maurice and Alec have thought it out – yes that’s so. And Forster pulls down the curtain on the happiness. To me the happy ending that works is the one where the curtain is pulled down at a happy moment that is possible or probable but you know that time marching on other consequences will have to be dealt with or that it could have ended in another way. And that’s this one.

I particularly admired and was glad to see how Forster shows the religious cleric works for evil: Maurice (we are told) had thought clerics naive, but he sees that Borenius has ferreted out the possibility that Maurice and Alec are perhaps lovers — and certainly that Alec was somewhere having sex, and Borenius’s attempt to lasso both Alec and Maurice in. Here Forster has put his finger on a central source for homophobia: the institutional church and the kinds of people that are found there very often use the power to destroy lives they don’t like — that they have no control over. The narrator has said (third person indirect) “there is no secret of humanity which, from a wrong angle, orthodoxy has not viewed.” And religion more acute in people as a perceptive tool will go after this secret. Maurice “feared and hated Mr Borenius; he wanted to kill him.” (Not that all clerics are bad people in Forster, e.g., Mr Beebe in Room with a View.)

But Maurice believes he and Alex can escape. One of things I dislike in the movie now (having read the book) is not enough credit is given Alec. Alec is the real hero of the book — he breaks through first. Maybe Forster thinks he could do it because he’s not educated out of his realities or controlled by class, but the novel is acute enough to suggest Alec had the character to do it.

Maurice is the most openly deeply felt of all of Forster’s novels — with our vulnerable hearts and bodies really laid before us.

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Mark Tandy as Risley — we see him arrested, and tried in the film (the character is almost meant to evoke Lytton Strachey)

The Merchant-Ivory Maurice is a mostly highly faithful heritage-style rendition of the book. It grated on me in a couple of ways. It has it more concrete or clear that Alec was willing to blackmail Maurice — it showed class bias in this. The movie also has many concessions to propriety as well as middle class heterosexual audiences. They are not willing to let Clive off so easily as does Forster. They have Anne Phoebe Nichols) looking oddly at Clive: she suspects something is awry.

What did I like? the splendid performances, the beauty of the settings and (I admit it) the actors. I thought it conveyed their vulnerability. The unapologetic love scenes were done with as much frankness and the same good taste one sees in the other M-I films – and recently (I think) Outlander. Here the material is treated with intelligence and a poignancy deeply felt. It’s a haunted film — haunted by loss of what need not have been lost.

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Denholm Elliot as Mr Emerson in A Room with a View (the part is played by Timothy Spall in t’other Room with a View)

To conclude, we did agree that what held Maurice, the book, back and also the movie (it is paid less attention to than others of this team though it won many awards and was filmed in spectacularly beautiful & iconic places) is their particular sexual subject matter. Alec and Maurice opt to be alive, to live for real, not to follow the hollow commands of social conformities. As before them do Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson (Room with a View); and after them, Helen Schlegel. Helen is not broken on the wheels of the world, like, say, Leonard Bast (Howards End) or twisted like Aziz (A Passage to India). Our three pairs and Helen get away with compromising less than Margaret Schlegel has decided to put up with (for the sake of more money and owning Howards End) and than Fielding and Mrs Moore have (across their lives in Passage to India). But they are (with the exception of Leonard Bast and from the early Where Angels Fear to Tread poor Lilia and her baby who die) winners all. I have omitted the intricate connections between these major presences and the many minor people who are there in their full humanity, shaped by and assimilated into the environment of the books, adding all sorts of complexities and nuances this brief blog can only indicate, sometimes allowed the most eloquent statement in the book (Mr Emerson in Room with a View). As the occasional imbecilic (funny or not), they are compassionated; as for the obtuse and cruel, narrow and rigid, corrupt, their punishment is to be them.

Ellen

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A magnificent Porgy and Bess at the Met

Porgy (Eric Owens) and Bess (Angel Blue)

Friends,

I have little to add to Anthony Tommasini’s finely discriminated strong praise of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as realized by a group of effective nuanced performances — the nuance, subtlety, and self-reflexive comic distance, which the actor-singers brought to the parts did a lot to de-emphasize and re-shape most of the white perspective on black people. I invite my reader to click and read Tommasini on the individual singers and specific events within the opera on stage.

To me it was a splendid appropriately pitched production. I sat there mesmerized.  The songs were beautifully sung by each and all the performers, the play acted believably, the dancing, singing and then individual behavior of the large black chorus on stage made the action into a modern masque that figured the pleasure and repeatedly last minute, unexpected (yet perpetually expected) tragedies of the people in the streets and on the docks, in the apartments and in the symbolic community buildings, and its Esser-like structures. The opera reminds me of the couple of mid-20th century American operas I’ve seen, e.g., Aaron Copeland’s A Tender Land: it is an ensemble meditative lyrical piece. There are dramatic scenes and a story line, but the emphasis is the group, individuals stand for types within a group, acting out necessary roles.

I thought Owens as Porgy outstanding and Angel Blue as Bess perfect in each phase of her role — the acting was in general pitch perfect from caricature to deeply felt. Everyone else is supportive or contrasting (the two bully males who Bess succumbs to).  I was drawn by the strong women characters, amused by the comic males (Sporting Life was done tongue-in-cheek), aware of the stories and losses of individuals. Archetypes were used and strongly emphatic performances.

Sporting Life (Frederick Ballentine) and Bess (Angel Blue)

There was a continual use of comic exaggeration to distance us and make us think about what we are seeing and as entertainment:

Maria (Denyce Graves) and upside-down the bully Crown (Alfred Walker)

The applause at the end was thunderous, and without meaning to take away anything from what literally happened on stage, as John Berger averred long ago, nothing occurs in a vacuum and I felt that everyone watching and acting was aware we as a group are living in a larger society now driven by bigotry, a renewal of race prejudice and open vile violent punitive behavior not seen openly in several decades. To do this opera and in this lavish way is to create a meaningful counter-punch against all Trump and his Republican party and their ignorant voters can do and assert belief in. The production is selling out and more performances than originally intended are now scheduled.

One of many ensemble scenes — there is much dancing, some ritual-like

The opera has a complicated often thwarted history because it has had to make its way in a racist society. The talk here shows how the opera is being seen as rooted in its context; its past and the surrounding society then and now embedded in the present production which has a message of hope, at least endurance and survival in a better future. Now we attend to the use of African music, the songs of African-Americans intermixed with the Broadway music and song rhythms and how this is worked into mid-century operatic traditions, both sentimental and stereotypical. And it is still daring to have a home-y kindly aging disabled man for a hero, a heroine who is raped in one scene (when Crown drags her off from the picnic) but in others succumbs to temptation, who sees the better way and cannot leave off her addiction.

Bess and Porgy in a companionable moment

Just a taste of the memorable poignant sensual Summertime as sung by Clara to her baby, a lullaby (the soprano Golda Schultz):

For this production the Met has mounted a show of black performers at the Met since its inception: it’s made up of pictures and the memorabilia of all black singers, and dancers too who were in operas on stage. It’s called Black Voices at the Met, though some of the people commemorated are there for costuming, sets, choreography. It seems also to remember those excluded: Paul Robson is there

I end on two poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

Ellen

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Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right: a scrutiny of clinical melancholia

Marcus Stone, “Trevelyan at Casalunga”

Dear friends and readers,

Though it’s been some time since I taught Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, and I have published a chapter of my book (Trollope on the ‘Net) on this novel, and know there is a sizable body of subtle interesting essays on the book — on the subjects of love, sex, marriage, custody of children, gender power, male abuse of women, male sexual possessiveness and anxiety — since writing on Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? after teaching it, I’ve been wanting similarly to focus on one aspect of this enormous and complex book, which we discussed in my class. This because I feel this perspective has the power to make the book function on the side of compassion in today’s world, and it was taken up by my class with real interest as reconciling together many of its disparate elements.

We can look upon He Knew He Was Right as a modern semi-medical study of anxiety and depression. I found the idea most fully worked out by C. S. Wiesenthal in “The Body Melancholy: Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, which appeared in the Dickens Studies Annual for the year 1992. In the case of Louis Trevelyan Trollope goes beyond his other studies of male who cross the line of sanity into insanity through obsession by a fixed idea, usually sexual jealousy, to present, examine and then trace the “psychopathology of melancholy.” He has gone beyond the traditional figure of melancholy (think of Durer’s famous icon) — super thinness, sleeplessness, profuse perspiration, paleness, hollow eyes, a bent back, his eyes not working right, all are slowly developed in Trevelyan.

Oliver Dimsdale brilliant as Louis Trevelyan, here he watches Emily leaving River Cottage (2004 He Knew He Was Right, scripted Andrew Davies)

In the last session of the class we examined Louis’s descent into profound illness and finally death as a gradual piling on of mental and then physical symptoms which destroy his ability to judge rationally and see what is in front of him. This leads to his inability to be around others, to adjust to them, so that he isolates himself in a nervous irritability. Most centrally he and Emily are just not compatible; what amuses her (social life, flirting) is anathema to him (he prefers to write papers in his study). He cannot bear the solutions presented to him as what he must do to alleviate the situation — take his wife away or come out of his study. He cannot present his case, adjust his conversation to theirs, and ends up intensely alienated from everyone. We were watching him break down step-by-step, with his hiring of Bozzle just one of the stages on his journey to a loss of the identity he had. Bozzle’s jokes are not just edgy, they have a sinister feel. The actor playing the part in Davies’s film adaptation had an expression on his face of self-deprecating irony, a wild laughter at himself,a kind of cunning in his eyes. He is alienated from himself and half-watches himself acting and talking in self-destructive ways, but he cannot help himself to stop. He writes letters from time to time which he thinks are offers of compromise when they are insults, threats, and come out of paranoia. Continual nervous distress and paranoia exhaust him to the point he becomes weak with inanition. He cannot dress himself conformably, is not used to sitting down to do anything with others. Bozzle sums this process up as Mr T “is no longer becoming quite himself under his troubles,” and wants to rid himself of this client. Louis crossed a kind of Rubicon when he paid Bozzle to kidnap his son. In his dialogue with Lady Rowley when the Rowleys come to England she discerns a mentally sick man.

Geraldine James as Lady Rowley, startled by what she is seeing

Seen from this angle, we could read the novel as a defense of Trevelyan: in his Autobiography Trollope said he wanted to create sympathy for Louis, and saw that he had failed. When I say the novel then becomes out about how Trevelyan came to act so badly, I would agree that this perspective is inadequate because it omits too much: Louis’s desire to control Emily, his insulting her for being knowing in bed (“harlot” is the word he uses); his overreaction to the petty rake, Osborne. Madness was in Trollope’s era thought to manifest itself in delusions, and he is delusional about what is going on between Emily and Osborne: flirting yes, adultery no. Emily’s refusal to assuage his anxiety at the price of her social liberty, life and self-respect are understandable, and the novel is probably more convincingly seen as genuinely feminist, genuinely about insoluble conflicts in temperament in marriage, the problems of using hypocritical cant. But Trollope also blame Emily for not yielding, refusing to compromise or reassure Louis — look how by contrast Dorothy and Aunt Stanbury give in and win out because they self-negate. She drives the man (the way Desdesmona does) when he visits by her recurring to the terms of the original quarrel and demanding he make a sign of admitting some wrong done; Trevelyan in frustration, and out of spite too, angry at his inability to make the Outhouses behave the way he wants — seeks some weapon he can use to compel the others to declare Emily sexually unfaithful, a bad wife, a mother risking her children. The weapon is his kidnapping of his own child. Now all will have to deal with him since the law is on his side over this child. We are now canvassing the larger important feminist themes and humane outlook at the core of this Trollope novel.

Uncle (Mr Crump) and Camilla

She cannot

Kindly collapse

Singling out Louis’s symptoms and trajectory —- helps us appreciate the depth of insight in Trollope. You can go round him to look at the other characters, and their coping with their bleakness: like Dorothy Stanbury who will say she is nothing to others, has nothing to offer, or Nora Rowley who wants more useful tasks and power than her gender allows; Priscilla Stanbury’s deeply generous letters showing her sane perspective against her life of poverty because she will not marry (is probably lesbian). The comic analogue to Trevelyan is the madness of Camilla French and her carving knife. She caves in easily when met with common sense backed by kindness. It’s funny in the film when Claudie Blakeley as Camilla breaks down and cries and hands the knife over to her uncle. But I suggest at the core of this is Trollope exorcizing his own demons: I agree with those (the Stebbinses are not alone in this) who suggest he spent long periods depressed (he says as much of his youth in London) and he is pouring his own experience into this character.

What I liked about ending the class discussion on the novel this way, and making this perspective one of the central ones is that the feminist position can become a series of beratings, blaming of Louis, anathematizing him. How does that help?

Ellen

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