To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive — RL Stevenson: a blog on books, films, art, music, culture
Trollope’s Lady Anna (from a cover for facsimile print-out)
Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding playing his violin in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles)
“It is useless to suppose that social distinctions have vanished” — Virginia Woolf, “The niece of an Earl,” from The Common Reader; a propos of Lady Anna, I quoted this as epigraph to my chapter on Lady Anna in my book
Dear friends and readers,
Let this blog signal that I am on the road to recovery. About two weeks ago I began to re-immerse myself in Barsetshire, preparatory for a class I hope to teach next fall (Making Barsetshire). I started rereading Hennedy’s Unity in Barsetshire, a wonderful — perceptive, well-written — old-fashioned close reading literary study I can’t recommend too highly. I began with the novels at the same time with my favorite Dr Thorne(“assigned for my online NYC and Beyond online reading book club)
Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne in the 2015 ITV Dr Thorne
St
Stefani Martini as Mary Thorne
— and watched Alan Plater’s Barchester Chronicles, which captures the complicated comic and grave tones of the books. How glad I am I discovered Trollope sites and friends on the Internet in the 1990s. These changed and enriched my life. I had promised to do a talk on Lady Anna for the online Trollope reading group I’ve attended faithfully when the pandemic began (March-April 2020) and told myself I didn’t need a typed copy to do it.
I also told myself typed lectures were not required to teach again and that a way to begin again without exhausting or straining myself was to repeat some favorite courses. I would finish the women’s detective novels course I had begun and return to Trollope’s first major successes, the Barchester books.
So I began rereading Lady Anna (about which I wrote one of my chapters in my book, Trollope on the Net). It was hard to do: I kept rereading passages I didn’t realize I had read; I had to outline the book as I went to get a picture of it in my mind). I found I could not write at the same level by hand; I had to type — arduous and slow process as my fingers wanted to touch type, but couldn’t. The left fingers were especially beyond conscious control. But with the help of my book, and memory, I achieved another version of “The lady ought to marry the tailor!”
I delivered that talk today to the online Trollope Society Reading group, although this computer was not attached to the internet. Laura was here, and attached the new laptop she had made into a semi-clone of this (she had moved onto it all but the movies & website materials) found here to the three screen set-up for herself to work for WETA from, and I sat down at it. She got it to work (including sound from zoom), and all went splendidly. The kind people welcomed me back. I have now put the paper on academia.edu, and the chairman of the society has now put the video of my talk on the London Trollope Society. I link it in here from YouTube as I have done my previous talks:
And here it is with the text beautifully laid out on the Trollope Society website:
My paper-talk outlines in succinct manner the core themes, characters, and suggests the nature of the art of the book by focusing on the key penultimate installment of the novel. Here it is linked completely in:
My syllabus for the fall for an online course I’ll call Making Barsetshire was also approved today
This will be a course on the origination and development of Anthony Trollope’s first cycle of novels, published between 1855 and 1866 (six in all). Barsetshire was not a planned series but evolved over time to become one. We’ll read the first three, The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Dr. Thorne. By 1857, Trollope came to see they were one imaginary-realistic county with its peculiar mix of themes, places, and recurring characters. The class will be asked to view outside of class, two marvelous film adaptations, Barchester Chronicles (1982, BBC) and Dr. Thorne (2015, ITV). We’ll explore how these relate to mid-century Victorian England and modern TV serials, our own era today, and Trollope himself
And now I’ll return to Hennedy’s book, Unity in Barsetshire before subsiding delightfully into another episode of the fourth season of All Creatures Great and Small, my next topic here (the books & the three iterations on film).
One of Constable’s depictions of the cathedral in whose “purlieus” Trollope said the idea for The Warden came to him
Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) and Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw): he has gotten for her an alphabet book
Dear friends and readers,
As is so common with me, I’m a few years late on this recommendation, but perhaps the year 2023 is more in need of this humane, intelligent, deeply-felt — and gripping, entertaining historical war film about US slavery, racism, and class privilege and deprivation. The film studies how human bonds develop, and how weak these can be against social norms, no matter how perverse and violent, when enacted and enforced by the legalized violence owned by high caste, rich, and ruthless elites. At each turn of the story I found myself recognizing analogies in my own experience of life and the lives of others I’ve seen all around me for lo these 77 years. The outline of the historical events, the general personalities of the characters, and specific events are historically accurate. Two main sources are Victoria E. Bynum’s Free State of Jones, and Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer’s State of Jones.
We move across about 15 years in the life of Newton Knight, whom we meet as a medic in the Confederate Army in 1862, and take leave of sometime after 1876, when he and the band of people, black and white, after many years of successful rebellion during the civil war, formed a community together in Mississippi with the intention of living a good life, undergirded by real human bonds and find themselves utterly victimized to the point many die, others flee. In the last part of the film the new civil rights (including the right to vote) are under fierce relentless (and more or less) successful attack by the old Confederate establishment, its laws and regime of terror and fire — through lynching and firing of men, houses and lands performed by the Ku Klux Klan. This historical story is punctuated by a story occurring 85 years later in the same area of Mississippi, where Newton, and his partner, Rachel (he could not marry her)’s great-great grandson is on trial for having illegally married a white woman. The latter part of the first sentence of this paragraph and the second one of the film’s last 11 years, have taken up proportionally far more space than the heroic uncertain and radical experience of the years 1863-1865 in the film. The central 2 to 3 year span of the film’s central development is well told in detail literally by the wikipedia article dedicated to the film
Sally (Jill Jane Clements), roadhouse landlady, abolitionist, facing questioning by military police
What’s omitted is the film’s clear and convincing “ideological focus” on the shared interests of black enslaved people who flee from their chattel servitude and poor and middling disenfranchised whites. The real Newton Knight and our well-played hero (kind and zealous) organized and inspired a guerilla army of black and white men and women (and children) who gradually (from an initial flight and life of a small band in a difficult swamp terrain) took over for themselves for what seems to have been a couple of years a sizable area in Mississippi where the confederate army could not come in and seize food, money, people. Newton is an ordinary – and intuitively ethical — man radicalized by circumstances. He forms real friendships with a group of escaped slaves including the significantly equally morally committed Moses Washington (Mahershala Ali), and holds onto his previous ties with a very few fellow white farmers. Early in the film, he becomes estranged from his white wife, Serena (Keri Russell) and over its course forms a loving partnership with Rachel, an enslaved woman working as a nurse in a nearby plantation. We move with him, and these other characters and further individualized people involved (like the abolitionist roadhouse landlady, Sally [Jill Jane Clements] and her black servant George [Troy Anthony Hogan] with his lieutenant’s hat and glasses) through a remarkable series of events, which expose the hypocrisies as well as the realities of the Confederate and Federal armies. For example, Sherman will not condescend to recognize Knight’s army as a legitimate force, and does not send them desperately needed arms and cavalry. At the close of the war, the enslaved people do not get the mules and land they were promised, but instead the white owner of the vast property by swearing an oath returns to control and profit from it and their labor. The film enacts believable human responses to some of the most important legislation of the war.
But it is no treatise. We are on our “guys and women’s” side as they fight back and kill back, bond, help one another. Wee experience real abrasion, foolish delusions (men in the army believe Hood’s promise if they surrender to let them have their farms and not hang them which latter he does immediately), see where women are sexually abused — but, as the New York Times critic, A. O. Scott (whom I quote here) says, “cruelty” is not turned into “spectacle.” Their talk and stories convey visual historical lessons Howard Zinn (author of often banned The People’s History of the United States, one of the film’s consultants) probably rejoiced in. Eric Foner was another; Martha Hodes, author of an award winning study of interracial sexuality was another. Newton’s way of voicing values like what you grow in the ground is yours, and “we kind of are our own country” is succinct, effective; the film’s didacticism is achieved with tact. We become very attached to the characters as during their time running their own small state, they experience better lives, partly through a rise in status among themselves, and I found myself intensely upset when at two of my favorite male black characters are murdered — for registering people to vote, voting, living with pride and dignity. Its ambiguous proud double ending — Newt and Rachel, with Serena come back to live nearby live out their lives on their farm in Mississippi, but under very tough circumstances; the great-great son goes to jail for defying the marriage prohibition — and sad song at the close stirred my heart.
Again Newt (McConaughey) and Moses (Ali) in a meeting house, explaining everyone (all males) who are citizens have right to vote
At the same time though much shorter in time span, the last 11 years where our “friends” are treated so unjustly and try to fight back clutch at our minds as we remember incidents in the political world we live in and (as I said above) perhaps incidents from our own lives. For myself how I once went long ago to try to get advice on going to graduate school, and was disbelieved by a bullying woman (I still remember a huge cross she wore across her huge bosom) who wanted proof of my average and then sneered at my ambition as a girl from a free college. I compared some of the moments towards the end of the film to the 2019 Great March of the Return in Gaza where Palestinians were murdered, maimed by the hundreds as they attempted to resist the brutal occupation and blockade by the Israeli armed state.
The acting was quiet, not overdone. Episodes are not ratcheted up to be a continual series of overwrought tremendously noisy and flash scenes. We really see how our rebel friends turn a funeral into a successful believable ambush; we see them pour the deadly “shot” (nails in bags) into the canons and fire. The film in this reminded me of Glory. Also a Peter Watkins documentary-like film on Culloden — a true masterpiece. It’s better than Glory in showing how horrible the mutilations of battlefield death and destruction of bodies are. In these scenes it’s anti-war. The landscape is beautifully filmed’ there are beautiful colors captured.
Gary Ross directed and was one of the two writers of the screenplay; the project was a labor of dedicated love, took 10 years to achieve, and had a hard time obtaining the funds needed. It is not a story the Lost and Glorious Cause, nor alternatively, a Fervent Abolitionist War, but rather how a rapacious, exploitative and deeply class- or rank-based society enforced a war, and how hard and often frustrated (and punished) resistance to this by a group of ordinary people could not last against the power of legitimized and/or accepted deadly humiliating violence. And yet these individuals hoped and lived on. Life itself is vindicated.
Again Newt (McConaughey) and Moses (Ali), this time riding into town to get back Moses’s son from a form of re-enslavement as an apprentice — this and other sly moments are filmed so as to look like Gone With the Wind or other conventional civil war movies
Another worthwhile review beyond Scott’s is by Richard Brody (again of the New York Times) who cites as one of the film’s flaws its thinking about slavery. Ann Hornaday (Washington Post) who also, while praising the film highly, complained it tried to do too much, and is a story of a white savior. Knight is not a savior, and because a film story focuses on whites does not mean it is not radically sympathetic to black people. Indeed there seemed to be among the reviews a desire to cut the film down to size, almost a resentment of its “noble” goals. These aims made it “stilted” according to the “review aggregator” of Rotten Tomatoes. For one explanation of why it is not remembered in the way it ought to be, see David Walsh of Socialist World Website. I especially liked Kevin Levin of the Daily Beast) whose idea it was that people could do with a little history. Many reviews here.
I loved many of the smaller moments: when Newton and Rachel enter the plantation house (now emptied of the fled family) and go up to the master bedroom where there is a beautiful bed, and Rachel tears up as she feels the mattress made of “feathers!” I felt her sense of proud surprise it’s she who is going to use this bed now with a chosen husband. I liked when Hood (Thomas Francis Murphy) sneered at a vindictive lieutenant that he is not going to hunt out a few renegades in a swamp to satisfy the lieutenant’s outraged dignity (those are not the words used). I particularly admired McConaughey who succeeded in a role difficult to put across persuasively today. The trick was the actor played the actor as someone who lived on the level of pragmatic reciprocation the people he had to deal with did, and had a script which allowed him to recognize verbally who were his friends’ friends and who their enemies. His angry rallying speeches (scroll down to last image) were great fun.
Listen to and watch the enthusiasm and raison d’etre of Victoria Bynum on writing her book:
I rush to write this brief review lest Anatomy of a Fall, an independent film leave the theaters before my reader can find time to see it. I was prompted myself to rush out partly because it was given such rave reviews and a friend urged me to go, citing the many prizes/rewards. It has been acclaimed by reviewers who views I respect — and others too.
More it was/is described as a mystery thriller, complete with gripping trial where a woman is accused of murdering her husband and setting the death up to look like suicide. I saw no detective cited but decided this was down my alley of endeavor for these last many months to see and understand why so many detective fictions/films with women at the center or written by women are so popular right now. The opening plot-design: a man falls from a high terrace, apparently a suicide, becomes the center of a murder accusation: that the wife threw him down; their relationship has been strained since their son had an accident in which his eyesight was badly limited, during a time when the husband was supposed to be taking care of him.
No surprise that I discovered the point of the courtroom drama was to offer opportunities for flashbacks and impassioned testimony by our heroine, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) against a ferocious predatory prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), whose accusations were endlessly laced with unacknowledged misogynistic slurs depicting her as a promiscuous (with other women no less!), a neglectful mother more interested in writing her books than home-schooling her child, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) as the long-suffering victim, the husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) does — as well as renovating the house he bought for them in his home-town, cold to said husband, violent. The riveting matter comes when she (and we) discover that he tapes her far more than he admitted and these audio/videos are played in front of us. Then we see/hear her slap her husband, hear him break glass, punch the walls frantically.
The son
What made it fascinating is that Sandra was not presented as a saint; she had acted the way the prosecutor claimed (affairs, looking out for her own career); she also (it turns out) blamed her husband for an accident to their boy that happened when the boy was left with the husband’s care: an accident that severed his optic nerve so he will never see well again. She shows a rare honesty in her intelligent defense of what she did, and anger at her husband for coercing them into leaving London for this retreat. She thinks he has reached a writer’s block and has been finding, inventing obstacles to get in his way. It fits into the best of these thriller/mysteries where the depth and interest is in the unfolding of the couple’s relationship to one another and to their son. It uses conventional tropes: the boy’s relationship to his dog, Scoop, becomes central to the outcome of the trial. Also important is her friendship with the male defending lawyer
The aim it seemed to me was to show a woman’s real life and expose how the court rules as well as attitudes of mind of prosecutor, judge, and populace are against her. The judge is a deeply unsympathetic (I felt towards the defendant) woman. Her team, the defense lawyer, Maitre Vincent Renzi (Swan Arlaud) and woman defender, Maître Nour Boudaoud (Saadia Bentaieb), seem continually stymied, ruled against. I won’t give the verdict and what happened away but would like to reassure my readers that the film is feminist, anything but misogynistic because of her deeply charged determination to tell the truth because she does believe it will rescue her. The film urges you to live your life in the way your nature intended; and shows you an instance of somehow who tried to live for real, managed some soaring (and writing of books) and yet remained pragmatic, practical, disillusioned about everything all but her son and her work (writing).
I loved the final scene of her lying down on a couch, her arm over the dog’s body in an embrace the dog nudges into.
This is a contemporary woman’s film, showing how transformed the genre of mystery-thriller, once a sina qua non for macho stories, with evil femme fatales at the center, or in the 1930s sleuthing spinsters — to dramatizing aspects of the hard lives of women today.
Being of an intellectual disposition, as I have watched with distress and horror the unfolding massacre in and continuing destruction of Gaza and step-up of illegal settlements of Israeli and displacements of Palestinians from the West Bank, I have been wanting to read a good book on what happened in 1947 and 1948. I had read years ago a historical novel, Tolstoyan type, which tried to explain how the Israeli army managed to destroy most of the Egyptian air force in June 1967, leaving its army open to successful attack.
In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, is not at all pastiche, but very contemporary in language and feel. Soueif mentions Tolstoy as her master. Here she is retelling what she suggests is the crucial war of the century, and how the betrayal of Egypt (its defeat) was engineered with Britain’s help, and fostered by some of the elite of Egypt too.
The Egyptian authorities deliberately allowed Israel to strike first in that war and so gave it the opportunity to destroy the Egyptian air force. Having wiped that out, it was relatively easy for Israel to win the war. Soueif indicts the incompetence & rivalries between different Egyptian people in power but what is striking to this reader is how she is careful to include someone saying to someone else, the Israeli planes are on their way a day before June 6th; that is June 5th. I remember how nervous the other character became, fearful that if Egypt hits first, Egypt will be the aggressor, blamed, and then the US will outright attack Egypt. But the US has not been in the habit of attacking other countries along side Israel whom Israel wants to destroy in some way.
This idea that Egypt dare not defend itself from Israel’s surprise attack because of fear of US retaliation emerges as false since what happens is the surprise attack not only pulverizes Egypt but allows the rest of Egypt’s army to suffer horrendous casualties. Whole units wiped out. It is really implied this was collusion of some sort — could it be that those in authority were thought to want a capitalist order to replace Nassar’s open socialism — remember he nationalized or wanted to nationalize the Suez canal. He was replaced by Sadat a pro-US person (pro-capitalist).
This is the Israel-Palestine proposed before the 1967 war: had this remained the boundaries of these “states” what happened this past month would not have.
It would seem there was a sizeable body of violent people ready to shrink (take away, steal) the Palestinian lands much further, and they were aided by the “western” capitalist countries (US, UK) and Egypt
If you want to read a summary of this, look at Marilyn Booth on In the Eye of the Sun, in World Literature Today 68:1 (1994):204-5.
It seemed to me though, it was no use to go back partially, to these various steps whereby the colonialists took more and more land until the tiny Gaza and vulnerable West Bank were formed; what happened originally in that first crucial expulsion of 500 plus villages. Well that’s where Amy Goodman supplied the historian: Ilan Pappe who has written several books, the most important being The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. It is a very expensive book; something like $9 for a kindle but a real book well over $140. I found on sale an MP3 set that will be coming by mid-November.
But since I have to take into consideration my reader might not him or herself want to read or listen to 400+ pages, and myself couldn’t wait, tonight I can share two reviews, and an early draft of Pappe’s book and summarize all this for you. The two reviews are Seif Da Na’, a review of Ethnic Cleansing (&c), Arab Studies Quarterly, 29:3-4 (2007):173-79; Uri Ram in Middle East Studies Association Bulletin of North America (MESA), 41:2 (2007):164-69; the draft is an essay by Ilan Pappe himself, in effect a first draft for the early chapters of his book, “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 36:1 (2006): 6-20.
What Pappe shows is it was not a war which displaced and turned 800,000 Palestinians into refugees, but a carefully worked out plan, based on minute detailed studies of the Palestine land, so that all the buildings and families and people in the villages could be rooted out by intimidation, outright violence, execution, sometimes in a blitz-like strike. A forcible expulsion; he names names, describes the whole of the operation. It is chilling. I have read of something similar in a review I did of an earlier pitiless extirpation and expulsion in Northeast Canada, of the Acadians (Christopher Hodgson).
There is much more to be learned from Pappe: I could afford (for $18 as a hard cover) his The Biggest Prison on the Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories [=illegal military continual operation]. Here he takes you through the various phases of a 75 year history of expulsion, pogrom, with the intervening wars and the attempts by the US, UK and other EU style “western” countries to get the Palestinians to accept a stasis two-state solution, which it’s hard to say if they would have accepted but Israel itself never wanted that (and thus helped build up Hamas against Arafat).
On the matter of this book (life in the “occupied territories”) I recommend (thinking of what is happening today), rather another short piece, this one published in the New Statesman, by John Pilger called “Children of the Dust (in the paper copy),” 28 May 2007, pp 26-28, online to be read. After you read let me suggest the key number to remember tonight is 40% of the people living there are children under the age of 15. Of those who survive, the rates of trauma are 99%. 6000 Palestinians are imprisoned by the Israelis. Pilger is also a post-colonial fine documentary film-maker
As Pilger says, the way most news organizations in the “west” treat the situation is utterly one-sided, in effect misrepresenting who is victim, who aggressor; but being this intellectual I went further than individuals out for their immediate self-advantage and various groups’ censorships (via media channels and control of people’s jobs), and looked to see what was the education about Palestine and Israel like. I found another excellent article (this is almost the last I will be recommending tonight!), Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, with the somewhat unappetizing, nay unpromising title, “The Fallacy of Academic Freedom, and the Academic Boycott of Israel,” The New Centennial Review 8:2 (2008), “The Palestine Issue,” 87-110.
A good deal of Knopf-Newman’s article is dedicated to showing how “academic freedom” in universities is only for those who hold the “right” positions at a given time. What else is new? As a long-time adjunct I know it’s a cover-up for justifying tenure, which used to function as closed union shops insofar as those without tenure are concerned. What should not have surprised me and did (I didn’t know) is education in Palestinian history, going way back to the 19th century, Palestinian studies, schools, books have been rigorously suppressed: schools destroyed, attempts at colleges unfunded.
This reminds me of Black American studies in the US. But because it’s familiar does not mean it is unimportant. The Israelis and others have prevented the accumulation of a solid basis of unbiased Palestinian history to study and with which to teach generations of people and to build from. Knopf-Newman brings out parallels with South Africa when an apartheid state.
As a feminist I cannot leave out women writers: I came across a review by Samar Attar of Women under Occupation: Fadwa Tuqan and Sahar Khalifah Document Israeli Colonization” Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe. Lanham: UP of Amer, 2010. The book is a collection of brief memoirs and cycles of poems. What is the experience of women in such a place — with their children, their lack of access to jobs, education, medicine, their vulnerability to rape. One of the surprised here is this book helps account for the oddity that Christian fundamentalists in the US are so vehemently pro-Israel: they support the colonization of “the Holy Land” for their own vision of worship, the Bible. Violence and prisons are a norm of everyday life; stories of torture (and torment); the trope of a Wandering Palestinian is common.
Colonial archeologists conspire with the invasion authorities, desperately trying to find ancient Jewish monuments under the rubble only to prove to themselves that they — the migrants/warriors from Europe— are not strangers in the land, rather their Palestinian victims are. But after the shock of the invasion, the defeated narrator soon recovers her senses. Her colonizer can prevent her from crossing the border, but will never be able to destroy her imagination …
The poetry is deeply bleak, melancholy, despairing. I know about the lack of archaeological evidence from reading Digging the Dirt by Jennifer Wallace.
Which gets me to my last very short article: Donna Robinson Divine, a review of Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Palestinian Thought, 1882-1948. This takes us back to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, where Zionism seems such a humane ideal, so innocent in the mystic character of Mordecai. Divine suggests that from the very beginning (well before 1917) buried in Zionist texts is the aim of transferring the Arab majority at the time inhabiting Palestine “elsewhere” and replacing them with a unmixed Jewish group of people. In order to find this out, you do have to study older documents in libraries; you need schools and centers to study.
So this is what I have to tell my readership tonight as to what they could be reading of use, essays and books of strong ethical eloquence.
Update: 12/18/2023: Final result: What does it mean to erase a people? its culture, identity, past, & aim at destroying future: From The Guardian
Timothy Spall as Larry Farquhar and Anne Reid as Ann Moore-Martin
In the comments, for comparison: When Harry Met Sally!— how to be a prisoner of genre and not care, two hours of it, and while below is how to use and transcend and stay within a genre …
Dear friends and readers,
I confess I have succumbed to watching nightly different movie stories from the vast array of mystery-thriller, spy, and now “true crime” stories that fill the streaming and mainstream channels of what passes for major TV and computer entertainment fare. My excuse has been I’m studying this genre and finding it worthwhile. If needed, beyond books and essays, there are excellent documentaries on the form, among them, Andrew Marr’s, which I summarized here some years ago (!)
Well about a week ago I found myself reading my daughter’s (full disclosure) blog-review of the coming British films available on American TV and channels and was drawn to one of her colleague’s discussion of The Sixth Commandment Timothy Spall is one of the great character actors of our era (e.g., Mr Turner),and I was interested because Sarah Phelps, the script-writer is a woman who has made Agatha Christie adaptations that are much better than the original books. I’d noticed Saul Dibb as the director of fine films too. Anne Reid I first saw as the housekeeper and Sergeant George’s mother in Andrew Davies’s Bleak House; then she held her own throughout the recent Sanditon as one of Jane Austen’s harridans whom Davies gave more humane depths to.
But I was not prepared for how stunningly moving and humane this one is. As art and deeper message, this serial is about as good as any film you’ll find anywhere. Lucy Mangan (in The Guardian) replays the themes Lucy Braugher discussed (just above) for PBS, only with greater subtlety and appreciation of how this differs from most of these “true crime” stories: the emphasis is not only on the victims and their families and friends; the movie accords intense respect towards the frail elderly repressed and lonely homosexual man and the naive elderly unmarried woman attached to her niece and her dog. It takes us beyond categories many people might be likely to turn from, or ridicule: It is “harrowing” (as Mangan says) and perhaps I feel a little uncomfortable in recommending what might seem morbid or voyeuristic matter (which I have to admit seems to be part of many of the more contemporary of these violent and sometimes frightening or anxiety-producing genre shows) but here the point is to remember what these real people were. It is form of honoring them.
Eanna Hardwicke as Ben Field when taken into custody
It is also to show us what evil is, that a man (or woman) can be evil: malevolent, at core malicious, predatory, and perceptive about other people’s needs, Ben Field (Eanna Hardwicke) is also central to why this film is important: it does not psychoanalyze him into a figure we can sympathize with, but leaves us with an Iago-like character. The trial scenes are fascinating because this seeming religious man boasts about what he did to these people. Some of the reviews that have been harsh have been angry at the attention paid to this cruel man but they have misunderstood or underestimated the full purpose of the film-makers. Louisa Mellor (Den of Geek) is one of those who does justice to the terrifying Field (who wanted to humiliate and play with these people beyond killing them)
Other cast members or characters add quietly to, or thicken the terrain. Peter’s brother and sister-in-law are played by Adrian Rawlins and Amanda Root, and we watch a slow build-up of suspicion allayed, and then increasing horror and profound anger as they realize what happened to their beloved friend. Conor MacNeill, the masochistic friend or scout-stooge somehow under the power of Field, adds intense pathos but also dread. The ferocity of Ann Moore-Martin’s niece (apparently orphaned and very close to her aunt), Annabel Scholey as Anne-Marie Blake, whose marriage almost breaks up as she lashes out at everyone because of her own guilt in not rescuing her aunt in time to save her life. Possibly this shot of Rawlins and Root as ordinary people captures something of the quality sought for these surrounding characters.
There was a slow careful build-up of tension, worry that something is wrong here, and when at the close of the first episode we realize that Ben has been lying and has now gotten the property and probably murdered Ben, the second part has to draw us in in a new way: we are led to see what’s happening through Anne-Marie’s deep distrust and attempts to take action against Ben. We are upset when before she dies, Anne is so angry with herself, ashamed of how her vanity and need led her to be taken in. The third episode we are eager to see Ben arrested so are watching as the detectives in the police procedural fashion gather evidence, and finally have enough. The fourth we are on edge lest the jury decide wrongly.
I feared Ben would topple the unsure Peter — and thought to myself, he won’t for he wants the money …
Andrew Marr is determined to make a case for respecting this form of novel and film. Possibly the finest use of a film like this is it does that. Look at the stills of the two actors playing Farquhar and Moore-Martin: we have lost these precious people. All these melodramas are socially realistic stories, where writers, as Val McDermid says, are tackling “the terrible things that happen in the real world.” They lead us to address death and violence through a complex moral dimension provided by the author. The different consolation that modern detective fiction offers (as opposed to older fiction say pre-ancien regime), Marr contends, is found in the individuals willing to bring to light to stop some horrible behavior on our behalf (ultimately): the good and caring man or woman who is the detective, police officer, the lawyer who carries the weight of bad world on themselves, often at the expense of living a life of their own, or because they haven’t managed to integrate into the social history we are experiencing. Our beloved Foyle, Peter Wimsey, Jane Tennison.
This one does differ from Marr’s archetype because the detectives play a secondary role, do not emerge as individuals any more than the brilliant lawyers who expose Ben Field do. The camera, the impersonal POV replaces this individual. Ann-Marie is told at the end that it was she who started the action that eventually put Ben Field behind bars. I wonder if part of the effect of this story is dependent on their not being this reliable person who tidied everything up with ease. After all, until the last moment, detectives and lawyers were worried sick, the jury would produce a verdict of not guilty, that Field could have maneuvered them into respecting him and dismissing his victims. They find Martyn “not guilty” and surely he did know what was going on. After 19 hours the “guilty” verdict of murder for Ben Field was an intense relief to me — I did not read what had been the conclusion of the real trial. The actor looked puzzled as if he could hardly credit he was going to be punished, put away for a long time (36 years minimum).
A seeming police photo
The landscape also did not seem to figure as centrally to the effect of the story as in most. Possibly this is due to its not having been a novel, but my understanding is that Wallander (which I’ve begun to watch and both Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hiddleston have engaged me) was invented as a series of films, and surely the bleak desolate river-scape of the stories’ backdrop is as central as England’s green and pleasant land is to Foyle (in the town of Hastings by the sea) or the many places Wimsey explores (from the fens, to Yorkshire, to Scotland, to central London). But then because it seemed so ordinary it is less escapist and like Susan Hill’s Various Haunts of Men (a book that gave me anxiety nightmares about my house being on the first floor and how easy it would be to break in) I could identify all the more with Peter Farquhar and Anne Moore-Martin. I was made nervous by a gardener I hired sometime ago and was much relieved when he finally stopped coming round after I told him, no more.
It is probably paranoid to imagine Ben managed to poison poor Rosie who dies during the story and might have been hostile to such a constant visitor …
Is there anything here which I can especially put down to the program having been written by a woman? a certain sensitivity to the nuances of private domestic life? the very vulnerability of elderly people: no one here is a macho male type, young and handsome, muscled, except of course Ben. Her work includes A Very British Scandal, with its deep pity for the poignant homosexual low status man (Ben Wishaw), almost done in by the brutal MP (Hugh Grant) …
My criteria for the excellence of Dr Semelweiss was Izzy and I must’ve been up for 19 hours in a row before we got to the theater; we exhausted ourselves finding it and had had no dinner, the beautiful theater had small seats and while we could see very well we were high up in the auditorium. And yet we stayed awake the whole time.
It’s an important subject for our time: in the US with the Dobbs decision, women are again in mortal danger if they become pregnant. A religious belief has taken over the legal reality, and the insistence there is a separate baby inside the woman from time of conception means that in some US states she is allowed to go as near death as possible before saving her when something goes wrong either with a fetus, or a developing neo-nate late in the pregnancy. She is treated as a potential criminal by these same states’ court. The motivation is a combination of misogyny and hatred over sex; what the anti-abortion people are looking for too is to end the right to contraception so it’s compulsory pregnancy if you have sex and your body becomes pregnant. The history of women and childbirth is a fraught and frequently tragic one.
The play is about a doctor who understood the large percentage of deaths of women in childbed in hospitals was due to no one washing their hands. Midwives at home knew to do this, but, as presented in the play, male doctors felt insulted. This is probably a simplification, but we see that Dr Semelweiss lacks the social skills to navigate the competitive institution he is part of, and eventually he is put in an asylum when he becomes hysterical because no one will heed his advice. He is so quietly poignant that I found him riveting. Because we were far away I cannot comment on other performances as despite Amanda Wilkin as his wife, Maria, emerging at the play’s close in a final eloquent speech. I love moral plays when done right.
The play is not presented realistically: we have a chorus and group of dancers, all women, who represent women dying in childbirth over the centuries, and they intermingle with the dramatic scenes. His wife becomes pregnant during the play too. The reviews have been mixed: David Bennet in Variety; Andrzej in Time Out; Kate Kellaway gets it right at the Guardian
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I cannot tell a lie and we did not see Private Lives though I longed to. As luck would have it, it was sold out for the one night (a Wednesday) we could have gotten there. I might have tried alone on the Thursday, but Izzy was against yet a third night out, and I can no longer trust my immediate memory to navigate myself in a strange city. I can’t use the google maps on my phone as navigator the way she can use hers. Here is Victoria Segal for The Sunday Times. I’ve read a couple of others and watched some YouTube video clips.
Of course I should have bought the tickets ahead of time, but I felt we could not know for sure where we’d be or how my hope of seeing my friend, Rory, and also meeting with Dominic Edwardes, the generous-hearted chair who has been so supportive of everyone’s talks for the Trollope Society on-line reading group would make for a schedule.
Confession: I have always found Private Lives boring, the way I find Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest boring. They seem set up as displays of frozen wit whose emotional depths are kept at a distance and I hoped these two wonderful actors (who I’ve seen acting marvelously in films many times) would finally bring the text a living depth. But Segal’s review makes me doubt they actually did overcome the artifice. I probably would have loved the “retro” aspect of it; I find I do not like contemporary theater productions when they are too contemporary.
I think I’m sad I didn’t go because I wanted to see the theater itself. I loved being in the Harold Pinter theater, the Victoria and Albert Hall, and wanted to renew my acquaintance with a third theater if possible during this week. There was Pygmalion that night at the Old Vic, but Izzy would not hear of it.
I have such cherished memories of Jim and I going to great theatrical productions now and again when we were in London. Probably the Old Vic stays most vividly in my mind because there we saw Alan Bennet’s Wind in the Willows a fine production of Jim’s favorite book from childhood, with an actually dying Jeremy Sinden as Toad in the closing lonely scene. Jim loved it. We saw James Norton in R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End in The Duke of York’s Theater one summer evening 2011. Here the play and the actor remain with me; here’s Lyn Gardner for the Guardian.
Last we must’ve gone to the National Theater complex at the Thames almost every time we came to London in the years between 1997 and 2005, where we really did come regularly to England each summer for Jim to join with a team from the 5 English speaking countries of NATO to plan, test, and discuss present and future problems. We’d stay in a Landmark Trust renovated building and eat in (so that the money he was given for eating out paid for Izzy and I to be with him).
Cloth Fair in Smithfield, London, was the place we stayed in most often
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Thursday mid-days, 11:50 to 1:15 pm,
F406Z Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now
8 sessions online (location of building: Tallwood, 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va. 22032
Dr Ellen Moody
We’ll read & discuss one of Trollope’s masterworks with an iconic title, The Way We Live Now. It’s a prophetic mirroring of our own era. Our aim is a close reading of this novel against the background of its own era & our own. Trollope dissects a crook financier who rises to the top of his society & wins a parliamentary election. We’ve an acutely insightful satire on literary marketplaces then (& now). The multiplot patterns includes a separated independent American widow, & a group of spirited women, whose stories bring in a host of women’s issues. We glimpse venture capitalism over railways in the southwest US, and by extension the post-colonial world. The core of this Trollope novel like are psychologically believable vividly alive characters. You could regard it as another face to other 19th century great novels (e.g., Middlemarch and Bleak House), an ethnographic milieu study. We’ll also discuss the fine 4 part serial scripted by Andrew Davies featuring David Suchet.
Required & Suggested Books:
Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now, ed., introd, notes. Frances O’Gorman. NY: OxfordUP, 2016. Or
—————————————–——————————–, ed., introd, notes Frank Kermode. NY: Penguin Classics, 1994.
There is a readily available relatively inexpensive audio-recording of the novel read by Timothy West reproduced by audiobook as 2 MP3s.
There is a also a brilliant film adaptation in 4 parts, scripted by Andrew Davies, directed by David Yates. Featuring David Suchet, Cillian Murphy, Mirando Otto, Matthew Macfayden, Shirley Henderson, Anne-Marie Duff, Maxine Peake. BBC One, WBGH, 2001. Prime Video but not available in all locations. It’s on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+way+we+live+now+full+movie. You can find as a DVD for sale for $8.99 used. It used to be available on Netflix as a DVD. Daily Motion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6wzlev
Cheryl Campbell as Matilda, Lady Carbury (TTWLN)
Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. You don’t have to follow the specific chapters as I’ve laid them out; I divide the books to help you read them, and so we can in class be more or less in the same section of the book. This part of the syllabus depends on our class discussions and we can adjust it. Please read for the first week, TWWLN, Chs 1-12
Sept 21: 1st week: Introduction: Trollope’s life and career. The context. Read for next week Chs 13-25
Sept 28: 2nd week: TTWLN. The immediate characters and their relationships. Read for next week Chs 26-38
Oct 5: 3rd week: TWLLN. Wider themes of money-making and class, the literary marketplace. Read for next week Chs 39-51
Oct 12: 4th week: TWWLN. The use of letters, places, treatments of males; the male career. Read for next week Chs 52-64. If possible, have seen the 1st quarter of the film adaptation (Part 1).
Oct 19: 5th week: TWWLN. The women in the novel. Their relationships with one another as well as men. We begin our discussion of the film adaptation. Why does Davies switch the presentation of the two main storylines? Read for next week, Chs 66-78. If possible, have seen the 2nd quarter of the film adaptation (Part 2)
Oct 26: 6th week: TWWLN. Is the book prophetic? what is relationship of our present situation to the Eurocentric colonialist past? How does the modernization of the sexual behavior of these characters affect the storyline? does it? Read for next week, Chs 78-90. Again, if possible, have seen Part 3 of the film adaptation.
Nov 2: 7th week: TWWLN. Is this a tragic book? or a satire? Why does it feel so large and rich and even global? How does Davies present the men in the film adaptation so as to make them sympathetic to modern eyes? In what ways are the women stronger in the film adaptation than the book? Read for next week, Chs 91-100. If possible, have finished the film if you can.
Nov 9: 8th week: TWWLN, have read Appendices 1 and 2 at the back of the book. How do you feel about these endings? is the conventional nature of them go against the grain of the book or with it? Did you like the endings of the film couples better? why? Is this one of the great realistic novels of the 19th century or not? How does the form the book takes now differ from the form originally envisaged? is it much improved? why? is it still not all that much changed?
Lionel Fawkes, “You are, I think, Miss Melmotte” (from the original illustrations to TWWLN)
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography and Other Writings, ed, introd., notes Nicholas Shrimpton. NY: Oxford Classics, 2014
—————-. “A Walk in the Woods,” online on my website: http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/nonfiction.WalkWood.html
Gerould, Winifred Gregory and James Thayer Gerould. A Guide to Trollope: An Index to the Characters and Places, and Digests of the Plots, in All of Trollope’s Works. 1948: rpt Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987 (a paperback)
If you want to go further, some recommended outside reading:
Gates, Barbara. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes & Sad Histories. Princeton UP, 1998. Very readable.
Mill, John Stuart, The Subjection of Women. Broadview Press, 2000. Online at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645s/
Green, Mark. “Trollope’s Children: Matilda Carbury,” The Trollope Jupiter, August 25, 2018. https://thetrollopejupiter.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/trollopes-women-lady-matilda-carbury/
Heineman, Helen. Mrs Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1979. This is the best of several recent books. See also Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Pamela Neville-Singleton. NY: Penguin, 1997.
Herbert, Christopher. Trollope and Comic Pleasure. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
McMaster, R.D. “Women in The Way We Live Now,” English Studies in Canada, 7:1 (1981):68-80.
Moody, Ellen. “On Inventing a New Country: Anthony Trollope’s Depiction of Settler Colonialism,’ Antipodes: Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature, 31;1 (2017):89-119
————. “Epistolarity and Masculinity in Andrew Davies’ Trollope Adaptations,” Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp 79-9
Overton, Bill. The Unofficial Trollope. NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth Century American Journalist. Syracuse UP, 2008. See also Kate Field, Hap-Hazard. Bibliolife, 2010 (facsimile of 1883 book of essays): Ten Days in Spain. BiblioLife, 2010 (facsimilar of 1875 travel book).
Snow, C. P. Trollope: An Illustrated Biography NY: New Amsterdam Books, 1975. A fairly short well written biography, profuse with illustrations and a concise description of Trollope’s centrally appealing artistic techniques.
Steinbach, Susie. Understanding The Victorians: Culture and Society in 19th century Britain. London: Routledge, 2012.
Sutherland, John. Trollope at Work on The Way We Live Now,’ Nineteenth Century Fiction 37 (1982-83):472-93.
—————–. “Is Melmotte Jewish,” in Is Heathcliff a Murderer. Oxford UP, 1996.
Surridge, Lisa. Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 2005. Includes a chapter on He Knew He Was Right.
Tanner, Tony. “Trollope’s The Way We Live Now: Its Modern Significance,” Critical Quarterly 9 (1967):256-71.
Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinity in Nineteenth Century Britain. London: Longman, 2005.
Vicinus, Martha. Independent women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1930. Virago, 1985. See my summary and analysis: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/martha-vicinuss-independent-women-work-community-for-single-women-1850-1930/
Cillian Murphy as Paul Montague, at Lowestoffe with Mirando Otto as Mrs Hurtle, waltzing with Paloma Baeza as Hetta Carbury at the Melmotte ball
Anthony Trollope as painted by Samuel Lawrence, 1864 — although I have access to the image only in black-and-white, it seems to me to come closest to showing the expression on his face of the sensitive compassionate mind behind the novels. It’s my favorite.
Dear friends and readers,
Last weekend the London Trollope Society met at Somerville College, Oxford, as one of the first all women’s colleges to open her doors, an appropriate place to discuss Trollope’s valuing and esteem of women. It has had since then many women as students and faculty, who became famous, and powerful after residing here. For a separate more humanizing account (what we wore, games we played, dinners), see Adventures in Oxford and London: Meeting Friends. We spent the weekend immersing ourselves in talk about Trollope who emerged as a man much engaged by women. One of those who spoke, Deborah Denenholz Morse (Inaugural Sara E. Nance Professor of English, 2017-22, Plumeri Faculty Excellence Scholar, 2022-24), at William and Mary College, said at the conclusion of her talk (via zoom, the only one) that she was determined we should see how much Trollope valued his woman characters, respected and loved them. How he showed their inner passionate natures when confronted with a lover or husband (“Lily, Glencora, Ayala, and Isabel: Female Desire and Women’s Rights in Trollope’s Novels”). Of course (just talking of this particular presentation) that’s not the same as being for their emancipation from hundreds of years of real and metaphoric subjection, not the same as wanting women to have equal rights in politics, in the professions, as one of the authorities of the family.
And therein lies the paradox a bundle of contradictions at the center or sides of Trollope’s thinking about women. As Dinah Birch, CBE and Professor of English at Liverpool College, put it in the first talk of the first day (she introduced and framed the themes of the conference), “Trollope’s thinking about women shifted over the course of his career as he encountered views that challenged conventional models of gendered identity, and grew more sympathetic to women’s struggles with constraints that limited their options. And yet he never abandoned the traditional idea that a woman’s happiest destiny was that of wife and mother.” The title of her talk comes from a concluding chapter in Framley Personage, but may be found in variations elsewhere: “What should a woman do with her life?” I find in my notes that Prof Birch said The Bertrams was more of a tragedy than comedy and of great interest because of Caroline Waddington’s determination to be someone through her husband. She talked of other individually-minded strong women in Trollope’s novels too.
Miranda Otto as Mrs Winifred Hurtle (TWWLN, 2001, scripted Andrew Davies)
Papers about Trollope’s wavering back to conventionality, whether tongue-in-cheek or not, while he drew ever closer to “respecting, encouraging, sympathizing with women’s aspirations for a much freer public and personal life” lent themselves to theses kinds of alignments. Elizabeth Cantrell’s “Let Women Rebel: Anthony Trollope and ‘The Woman Question,'” was brilliant in bringing before us details in so many areas of life where we find his books and real life experiences middle class women directing their own lives in real life and in his fiction. Both women and men wanted a freer public life. She reminded us how many minor feminist women writers Trollope was enthusiastic about or worked with. She talked of parallels between the enslaved and married women’s position. Women similarly lacked autonomy and we watch them in the era slowly gain genuine rights, power and socialize (some) men (to support women and children) too to behave better to them.
I admit while the comparison of women with chattel slaves seems incommensurate, women’s lack of property, bodily and mobility rights before the law seems to edge her towards chattel slavery. On the one hand, the distance is immense: the enslaved person has no say over the next moment of his or her life, over his or her body, no respect as a human being. And yet “captivity” seems a familiar mode in this earlier period: so many people were indentured servants for example. We need to see women in this context of a lack of liberty for so many people at the time.
But other papers took considerably different directions. Alluding to Rebecca Traister’s marvelous book about unmarried women’s successful lives in the 20th century, All the Single Ladies: The Rise of an Independent Nation, Professors Linda McCain (Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University) and Alison Tait (Professor of Law and Associate Dean of faculty in the University of Richmond, Virginia) spoke from a long paper they had published in Washington Journal of Law and Policy, “Household Intimacy and being Unmarried: Family Pluralism in the Novels of Anthony Trollope,” where they describe and detail in a number of Trollope’s novels his depiction of non-marital couples and families, made up sometimes of unmarried women and men who find real satisfaction and happiness in life without marriage or children. Notable examples include Miss Baker in The Bertrams, Miss Todd and Miss Troughton in Miss Mackenzie, Mrs Prime, a widow ruling the all women household in Rachel Ray, Lily Dale preferring to set up life with her mother, and the DeGuests in Small House at Allington and Miss Thoroughbung and Dolly Gray with her father preferring life with her father to a husband (Mr Scarborough’s Family). This is not to deny the heterosexual marriage is still one of the central concerns of Trollope’s fiction, but it exists amid a variety of other satisfied life patterns. As they covered all these unmarried and variously active female characters, Trollope’s fiction took on a new dimension.
In my paper, “Trollope’s Intriguing Women and Their Friendships,’ I also pointed to repeating patterns in Trollope’s fictions which are often not paid sufficient attention to, but when studied, yield a different way of thinking about his books and his women. I suggested that we look at them from another angle than we usually do: against the turning points in the novels which dramatize women’s relationships, from women’s various kinds of friendships to as mothers-and-daughters, and as sisters. From studying Clara Amedroz and Mrs Mary Askerton’s friendship in The Belton Estate, we begin to see how important and central a friendship may be in a woman’s life; we are also led to feel for transgressive women who are ostracized and left isolated and alone in their societies, except for the (rare but there) loyal woman friend. I looked at the turning points in the plot-structure of The Way We Live Now in the women’s decision-making with one another, and the pain of conscious justified betrayal when frenemies exclude one on grounds of self-protection (in fact just the opposition state ensues, i.e., vulnerability and eventually possibly destitution). Looked at from the angle of what one might called an embedded woman’s novel, the unabridged The Duke’s Children has a third not-so-ghostly couple, Lady Mabel Grex and her ex-lover to whom she had been engaged, and Frank Tregear, whose past together haunts the book the way Lady Glencora as absent mother haunts and shapes it. The Duke’s Children unabridged looked at this way becomes a richer and different book.
Janet Maw as Eleanor Bold wooed by Peter Blythe as Bertie Stanhope (Barchester Chronicles, 1983, scripted Alan Plater)
Some of the papers or talks did not follow any narrow trajectories. Mark Green (editor of Trollopiana who has an interest in Golden Age Detective fiction) talked about “Women and Money,” about the constraints women were subjected to when they attempted to earn or to control their own or inherited money. What could be a more central topic affecting women in Trollope and the 19th century. “The legal position of women during many of Trollope’s novels is couverture,” he said. He told us the provisions of the Married Woman’s Property Acts; for example, what was settlement. Under the pressure of these new laws, and women seeking to make them active (through lawyers — the upper middle class) economic circles eventually changed drastically. Martha Dunstable is our early (fabulously) wealthy heiress — from a version of “snake oil.” He also called attention to Eleanor Bold as wealthy widow. Prof Nicholas Shrimpton (Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall) was interested in Trollope’s portrayal of “what constitutes good or bad female behavior” from a conventional POV (what was modesty and immodesty). Virginia Grinevitch, closely studied Griselda Grantley whose name makes it emphatic that she is to be judged (ironically) against a screen of assumptions and symbolic thinking at first taken from Chaucer’s Clerk’s tale, and then in contrast to other of Trollope’s characters (like Lucy Robarts, or Mr Harding) in seven of Trollope’s novels (where she appears). Ginny suggested we can use Griselda Grantley as a measuring stick with Trollope more or less hostile to her as mercenary, heartless, and at the same time ironically successful in what she sets out to do and to be.
Professor Helen Small’s (editor of Journal of Victorian Culture) gave us a full exegesis, of the candid unconventional sexual content of Trollope’s two salacious (Trollope had difficulty finding any publisher) sexually unconventional short stories, “Mrs General Talboys,” who living in the Anglo demi-monde of Italy plays at committing adultery, and “A Ride Across Palestine,” an obvious homosexual-homo-erotic encounter (or Hero and Leander as in Christopher Marlowe) at length between two seeming men (one turns out to be a woman). We can connect them to the “Platforms” or journals they appeared in — we are in “queer Trollope” ground, according to Kate Flint’s nomenclature. Trollope was making a provocative use of the printing press. A third which appeared in the London Journal, “The Parsons Daughter of Oxney Colne,” does not on the surface seem as as much about sexual ambiguity, but rather sexual availability, but there is a real if quiet life ravaged here. Full scale human loss
Anna Carter as Lady Mabel Grex (1975 Pallisers, concluding episodes)
On the final day, when all the papers had been read aloud, and it was time for one more lunch and then adieus, those who had given papers came up in front of the room and sat in a row of chairs to answer a group of questions. Some were fun: which Trollope character would you like to spend a lot of time with? Others yet more about male-female human relationships and money and the experience of life in Trollope’s novels from the woman’s POV.
Last night, the night before our trip to the UK, I began to read Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and could not put it down. I was nervous about the trip and wanted to have my mind absorbed. Well, it was. I read to the end, sometimes skimming but getting the point, the details, taking it all in.
The condition of thousands of Black people in 2016, of large numbers of whites, of many minority people is as desperate and impoverished as they were in the 1950s, before Black people were permitted to vote at all. Different oppressors, different bosses, with some lines thrown out but often these are delusional (like the services for autistic people when adults looking for employment). Now, as we know, their votes are being suppressed, gerrymandered, thrown out out of existence; when they get office in the south, sometimes they are legally (shenanigans) or illegally removed so as to stop them from answering their constituents needs and wants.
The details and stories are so real. If you are not terrified, you are not thinking — about say your own condition, your sources of money and what, say the GOP would like to do to all of that if they & Trump take over the executive & congress once again. I am terrified. I need my social security, my widow’s annuity, my medicare.
I don’t have time for a review of the material in detail so here’s the New York Times:
A home should be a fundamental human right — FDR said that more than 80 years ago.
I bought the book as a result of attending virtually the National Book Festival, and listening to Desmond explain how huge numbers of middle and upper middle class people indirectly profit from their low tax situation and the way the laws work on behalf of the landlords and the money-extracting people. Read Katha Pollitt for The Guardian
Desmond’s family experienced eviction themselves. He did make it from attending college with scholarships to Harvard and now after years of living with these people and research, did what he could for them — and us..
Everyone should read it. If you want to find America, the reasons for the crazy rise of insane anger aimed at the wrong people by the GOP & Trump, you will have a depiction of one central source of it in your hands. Desmond is eloquent but also practical and at the close he explains what could be done: what stands in the way beyond upper middle class people indirectly, are those directly profiting and the politicians who gain office and take (needed they say) campaign contributions. Bribes from lobbyists. We need to fix the supreme court too.
From Between Two Worlds: Juliette Binoche as Marianne Winkler, an uncover journalist working with people who clean luxurious ferries in the dead of night
Dear friends,
So here I am with the second part of this blog, only this time I begin with a good movie, again focusing on women, which I’ve just seen and want to recommend, and then go on to the four poems I want to share. Between Two Worlds is based on Florence Aubenas’s The Night Cleaner, a best-selling memoir of a journalist who presented herself as another near destitute person to an employment agency, where she is led to take a low paid gruelling job as a cleaning person in a team driven to do far too much for them in a brief period of time. Like The Miracle Club, it’s directed and written by women, with a nearly all women cast, and like them is getting mostly luke-warm reviews, which this time concentrate indignantly on the attention spent on the hypocrisy of passing and using other people’s trust and friendship to produce a book. (An English language version of this is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, by contrast, curiously enough treated with real respect.)
I find the supposed discomfort with Binoche and the story-line as narrow and unfair as the reviewers find the POV of the film. It’s the experience itself, what it’s like to live such a life, and the knowledge that huge numbers of people in the world’s economies now are driven to such extremities (3 jobs with barely time to sleep), treated harshly and indifferently. I found myself remembering my 27 years as an adjunct and the snobbery and hard work for a derisory salary I was subjected to; remembering my daughter Laura’s two years working with a team of lighting and decoration experts who did the same kind of hard work in the dead of night at stop speed, pushed on harshly by supervisors; I saw it with two women friends, and they too when it was over, had been excited and moved to remember analogous experiences of their own. The gig economy now reaches millions of people in the US. Not only go see it, but vote to help unions, to re-distribute taxes so the wealthy pay their real share, and the money used to create reform, change and better working lives for all people.
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And now I have four more poems to share that I know Jim loved to read from poets who were his favorites. For Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings and C.P. Cavafy Jim had several books each, sometimes it was just books of poetry (cummings 4 books), sometimes books of letters and a life (Auden and Cavafy), and sometimes studies of the poetry with just one book (Larkin).
The poetry by Larkin Jim inclined to most was not the famous shocker types (“This be the verse”) but more the longer ones drenched in history (around churches, chapels, buildings), but he quoted the most
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
I’m probably going to be quoting the famous poems here, for again with W. H. Auden I see some longer moving meditative pieces that are too long, but I cannot resist (with its very own picture)
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69)
His is a messy poetry.
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e.e. cummings Jim appreciated the love poetry, the erotic stuff, the lack of pomposity; many of them are impossible to replicate in a blog, for their effect is dependent on stanzaic playfulness, breaking with regular punctuation. Jim found cummings to be joyful, and I’ll copy one of those I think his best, very allusive:
Ithaca (so many translations, this by Edmund Keely)
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
For this I have a video of another poet reading aloud his response:
When you set out from Ithaca again,
let it be autumn, early, the plane leaves falling as you go,
for spring would shake you with its quickening,
its whispers of youth.
You will have earned the road down to the harbour,
duty discharged, your toll of labour paid,
the house four-square, your son in the full of fatherhood,
his mother, your long-beloved, gone to the shades.
Walk by the doorways, do not look left or right,
do not inhale the woodsmoke,
the shy glow of the young girls,
the resin and pine of home.
Allow them permit you to leave,
they have been good neighbours.
Plank fitted to plank, slow work and sure,
the mast straight as your back.
Water and wine, oil, salt and bread.
Take a hand in yours for luck.
Cast off the lines without a backward glance
and sheet in the sail.
There will be harbours, shelter from weather,
There will be long empty passages far from land.
There may be love or kindness, do not count on this
but allow for the possibility.
Be ready for storms.
When you take leave of Ithaca, round to the south
then strike far down for Circe, Calypso,
what you remember, what you must keep in mind.
Trust to your course, long since laid down for you.
There was never any question of turning back.
All those who came the journey with you,
those who fell to the flash of bronze,
those who turned away into other fates,
are long gathered to asphodel and dust.
You will go uncompanioned, but go you must.
There will be time in the long days and nights,
stunned by the sun or driven by the stars,
to unwind your spool of life.
You will learn again what you always knew —
the wind sweeps everything away.
When you set out from Ithaca again,
you will not need to ask where you are going.
Give every day your full, unselfconscious attention —
the rise and flash of the swell on your beam,
the lift into small harbours —
and do not forget Ithaca, keep Ithaca in your mind.
All that it was and is, and will be without you.
Be grateful for where you have been,
for those who kept to your side,
those who strode out ahead of you
or stood back and watched you sail away.
Be grateful for kindness in the perfumed dark
but sooner or later you will sail out again.
Some morning, some clear night,
you will come to the Pillars of Hercules.
Sail through if you wish. You are free to turn back.
Go forward on deck, lay your hand on the mast,
hear the wind in its dipping branches.
Now you are free of home and journeying,
rocked on the cusp of tides.
Ithaca is before you, Ithaca is behind you.
Man is born homeless, and shaped for the sea.
You must do what is best.
Here the poet is online reading aloud:
I never had this kind of courage; Elinor Dashwood is more my gravatar. You may note that all four of
these are bookish, literary, even cummings depends on our remembering Chaucer.
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 