Hemorrhagic stroke

Dear friends and reader,

Here’s why I’ve not posted for weeks: I wrote this to a literary women, Anne Boyf Rioux, in answer to something she wrote to me on her substack newsletter: I had had sent one of my foremother poet postings: Muriel Rukeyser

Foremother Poet: Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Very unfortunately since I last wrote on this substack newsletter, I had a stroke (Jan 30th, 20240) and now find myself painfully trying to recover. Among the abilities I seem to have lost is typing. I have many ” side” problems like this (insomnia, constipation); centrally I cannot walk w/o a walker and am in danger of falling. I’m physically weak. Where I was for many years (until Jan 29), a rapid touch typist I cannot get my left hand to type anything but slowly and inaccurately. I have been trying to get access to therapy for typing, and as yet have failed. I discover Kaiser might not have such a service. I am again waiting to see — now next week. They provided therapy at the rehab (I was in one for a few weeks) and now at home; but hardly enough. I discover I don’t have medicare but medicare advantage paid to Kaiser– and nothing else. I find nothing on the Net; if this new offer by Kaiser is another sham, I shall try AARP, but feel I will again confront no living services. I’m told of complicated software I probably cannot operate without an at home teacher. It is a kind of death for me.

To a friend at Olli at Mason:  I can read and this isolation is bad for me so I am going to try to teach a mini-course online (4 weeks in June at OLLI at AU), using all I had created at that last OLLI at Mason. Going to try to do a Trollope talk using handwritten notes. I walk a little better but still need a walker and in danger of falling. I signed up for women’s rights class and the Sayers during summerat Politics and Prose (though they are pricey) online

I can read. I can write with my right hand

Ellen

Winter Solstice: Ghost and Christmas stories

A photograph of the snowy Yorkshire Dales (light cover of snow), 2023 (from All Creatures Great & Small)

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past few years I’ve made a habit of writing Christmas blogs — on movies I’ve seen, Christmas specials of TV series, books or stories read, or as a theme in a long-running TV series (e.g., “Christmas in Poldark“). I suspect I’ve written too many, of which too many were overlong (just type in Christmas in the “search” box to the right side at the bottom). Well, this year I have but one thus far (and may not have another), the ghost stories I read recently in a Politics and Prose online course with a professor of British literature, Victorian specialist, Nicole Miller. I enjoy ghost stories, and myself taught them for about 3 years at George Mason, and know she partly chose the topic as appropriate to Christmas time – she also teaches a much longer-length one at the college where she is (presumably) tenured. The telling of such stories is presented by people today as having been prime entertainment during Christmas in the 19th century, the first era of our present commercialized Christmas increasingly centered on family and friends.

John Millais, “Christmas Story-Telling,” “Christmas Supplement,” London News, 20 December 1862

On our Every-Other-Week online Trollope reading group (hosted by the London Trollope Society), we may be said to have almost suffered through one of Trollope’s rare failures, “The Two Heroines of Plumpington”. I say almost because the story was rescued by the hard work and absorbing information the speaker bout the story, Chris Skilton, brought to and out of the story. He showed how autobiographical it slyly is, and its themes of class, ambition, money. After he finished people in the group immediately began to talk of problems or flaws in the story.

I offered the idea that writing Christmas stories was such a trial for Trollope, such a struggle to pull off, because Christmas stories have since the inception of this custom been associated with or outright ghost stories, and nothing was further from Trollope’s robust and sceptical temperament — than either the prevalent type, unnerving, uncanny, often with a malevolent revenant, come back to haunt indiscriminately whomever is unlucky enough to enter their imaginary; or the type Dickens seems to have been the first to invent, in his The Christmas Carol, where benign presence (or presences) come down from somewhere determined to retrieve the past, and redeem the present of some suffering wronged or wrong-full person. Is not this It’s a Wonderful Life, even if 20th century disbelief seems to demand a being no-one credits for real, an angel who looks anything but? Clarence, we all instantly remember, needed to be promoted — what a mid-century American comic take for the sake of probability.

Henry Travers as Clarence (It’s a Wonderful Life)

Miller’s was a very rich course; we met for 2 and 1/2 hours for three sessions (each staying over an extra half hour) and read some interesting (some of the best) stories by Dickens, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. I’ve written about The Turn of the Screw here (as “the problem of moral panic”), and several of the Edith Wharton’s on this blog, Austen Reveries and the gothic section of my website (see Reading … Winter Solstice, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,,” “Afterward,” “Mr Jones,” as well as Dickens’s “The Signalman: the trauma of technology.”

Before each of the three discussions about the individual authors, Prof Miller held forth on ghost stories themselves, or some aspect of them related to the author we were exploring that session. It seems the form was especially reveled in by British and American authors; and may be said to emerge archetypically from fear of shadows (all sorts) in our homes, accidents and traumas surrounded by an atmosphere of the new large cities, phantoms from newness, unknown “strange” people, eruptions from people’s pasts, the old (haunted houses), the new (scientific discoveries, psychical research), dread of death and the dead (seances). M.R. James (see my blog on recent film adaptations to be found on YouTube) singled out reveling in spectacles theatric, evoking from the mind psychological allurement of dramatic interaction, strong literary high quality (your language must be powerful and precise), frightening and short. The reader must be complicit; the author creative and original. The ghost and Christmas story is bound up with our reaction to winter, the cold, the darkness, change. The story that ends with redemption offers balm to our anxieties over time, non-integration of ourselves (we are left out, left behind), a saving of a desolate soul. This is a view I agree with.

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The book I used to read Dickens’ ghost stories in is Peter Haining’s Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens, Franlin Watts, 1983, with original (Phiz) illustrations. They are too small to make the nightmare impact intended. I read a number of them and was impressed how the pattern we find in Dickens, of a withdrawn man transformed by an experience of the supernatural recurs; similarly, that Dickens was himself sceptical of the reality of ghosts, despite the Christian providential nature of his paradigms. Near the later part of his life he while traveling with Ellen Ternan and her mother was involved in a disastrous train crash, and the trauma of that is translated into “The Signalman.” Scrooge resembles him in life in numerous ways — which has also been pointed out by others.

Alistair Sim as Scrooge on Christmas morning, fairly hysterical with relief as well as cheer

Since so many of us have heard or watched A Christmas Carol, and (I assume read about it), I shall keep this section brief (see my blog on how I cried and cried the last time I watched). The famous opening rivets us. Insistence on how Marley was dead. All is dark, bleak, Scrooge a withered utterly selfish sardonic alone old man. The clock tolls throughout the story: there are many bells. The uncanny and inanimate come alive. The point (as in other stories in this volume) is to reform, transform Scrooge. The air he travels through with the “Ghost of Christmas Past” is filled with phantoms. A Blakean world of the dispossessed. “Christmas Past” is presented as a child-like old man. We see the boy abandoned. We see how little it literally cost Fezziwig to make cheerful scenes for all. Christmas present is the ancient Green Man turned sardonic. A cornucopia of delights. The famous boy and girl, Want and Ignorance — wretched, abject. Then the last fear of death. This phase continues modern desolate scenes — like the lighthouse in the storm. Amber colored. Scrooge cannot face that he is not mourned, that he is erased, his things stolen. Then when Scrooge awakens and it is only the next day and he feels he has time to change, the intense joy.

An illustration from a volume of Dickens’s Christmas stories, 1867: The apparition, more in the mood of “The Signalman”

By contrast, the deeply darkly haunted nature of “The Signalman” and by the end how little explained. This comes right out of Dickens’s own traumatic experience of a vast train crash, where he played the part of a hero, rescuing people at risk of his own life. Prof Miller thought Dickens’s fiction itself as a whole altered after this incident. The man isolated by technology; given no chance to educate himself and live among men due to his class. The earlier stories in the volume are yarns, the later ones sceptical.

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A still of Michelle Dockery as the awestruck governess, maintaining some calm (Sandy Welch, 2009, framed by a story of an unjust imprisonment of an apparently disposable woman)

For Dickens, much of the class time was taken up by “A Christmas Carol,” which is a literary gem, perfect masterpiece and she hardly got to “Signalman,” so she avoided “Turn of the Screw” until near the end — incurring resentment I felt among some of the people in the room who were there to discuss this never-endingly intriguing (ambiguous) novella. I learned that the misogyny has gotten so bad that some people regard the governess as wholly a liar, now living in an asylum (thus degrading her utterly and making the manuscript inexplicable), which explained to me for the first time why Sandy Welch’s 2009 Turn of the Screw is framed by showing us the governess put unfairly into an asylum while the inset flashback story has the children in utter collusion with the evil ghosts (there all right).

Quint and Miss Jessel from the 2009 film

Flora — look at the child’s face

When first published, it was rightly seen as capable of being interpreted as a governess caught between two deeply harmful corrupting spirits and susceptible yet still partly innocent (unknowing fully) children.

For Henry James, though I had many of the stories separately in decent editions with introductions and notes, I bought the recommended copy (sold by Politics and Prose too), Ghost Stories of Henry James, Wordsworth edition, 2001, re-issued 2008, with an introduction by Martin Scofield. The book also includes James’s prefaces to all the stories but The Turn of the Screw, and his musings/introduction to The Turn of the Screw. Scofield is very helpful. An early story, “The Ghostly Rental,” surprised me by unnerving me. I began to have the kind of inward fears of myself that M.R. James can provoke. James has the power of sudden single powerful words to make the reader feel a ghost is suddenly caught on a page. There are moral lessons in “Sir Edmund Orme” (against bad actors), and stories that hint at Bluebeard and Medea paradigms (murderous men, vengeful women). There is a coolness here; he undermines beliefs in family love, is himself almost anti-children — who are seen to be collusive and alienating in stories beyond The Screw. In one story, not a ghostly one, a novella, The Other House, James has a group of people murder a child and get away with it. After that I could not read James for years.

For Henry James, Miller concentrated on “The Friend of the Friends,” where the friend is no friend to two others, and in the story’s end does all she can to keep them apart (out of jealousy) and “The Jolly Corner,” where the corner is a site of telepathic unnerving doubles, signaling death, as well as a portal to an imagined world where James could overcome his revulsion a reality, and invent richly. The conceit of the “The Friend of the Friends” are the two targeted people each had a parent who died and appeared to them at the moment of death. They are obsessed with meeting but somehow something always comes up to prevent the encounter; until at the death of the woman they do meet, and our narrator believes this enables them to meet ever more. In both stories we are in a thicket of dreams and events that are like the forest of fairy tales. I liked the way she talked of “The Jolly Corner” to make it an explanation of James’s obsessive themes of life, living having passed him by, missing out on being another admirable self, life as an adventure because the need for a sense of security makes the narrator withdraw to seeming safety, but leaving his conscience haunted. Alice Staverton in the story, the childhood friend, could stand in for Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Jodhi May as the governess is the victim, if herself neurotic, of Colin Firth, the exploitative master, in Nick Dear’s rendition

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From the edition I was reading, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Scribner, 1973, illustrations Laslo Kubinyi

The third and last, the Edith Wharton session seemed to satisfy everyone — equal time given to about 6 stories. Prof Miller saw Wharton as pulling together the theorist, personal experience, a cultivation of art, with a real feel for the uncanny. Her ghost stories are mostly post WW1 (though they can be set back in early modern and 18th century times) and are a reaction to that calamity as well as her study of Freud exploration of the irrational inner life. Dickens is writing Victorian and Wharton 20th century ghost stories, with James bridging the two eras. Yet the characteristics of each are not predictable by era: in James the ghosts erupt from within people, are their terrifying other selves. I should not omit sceptical humor in Dickens (especially from Scrooge), and how quietly good M.R. James is at this

In one filmed story of M.R. James, a character needs binoculars in order to see the ghostly castle

Wharton’s stories are of severe female oppression/ imprisonment, of people haunted by dead people, some of whom remove a beloved from us. In “Kerfol” (see the above illustration) an early modern woman is kept alone as in a cage and each time she finds a companion in a dog, the dog is slaughtered; “Mr Jones” reveals a similar story that occurred 2 centuries ago, with a vampire controlling two women in the mansion in the present day, seemingly idyllic. These stories are filled with places women must flee from. “Pomegranate Seed” differs in being aligned with the myth of Persephone, only now Persephone is a dead wife who writes letters to her husband now married to our heroine, letters which deprive him of life’s blood, he himself goes grey, feebler, and eventually, like the husband in “Afterward” disappears. I remember how when I first read them, they made me feel dread I would lose Jim similarly. Well I’ve lost him, but not to a ghost. Like James, some of these stories are intended to baffle us, with the ghost visible only to the seer. “Fullness of Life” an early, and “All Souls” a late story both concentrate sheerly on the inner life of the protagonist, so there is little left of the Victorian gothic furniture, not even revenants for sure. Gentle souls, hounded, abandoned in a sinister silence — “Afterward” has the heroine for the rest of her life in that still house in the library room with some “horror” she feels is there forever after. This is like the person who sees these accusatory eyes after he has done some morally reprehensible (if not criminal) deed.

From “Afterward:” this is before the woman has lost her husband but has premonitions, glimpses a ghost from the old house’s parapet

As with Dickens and James, but more so (more stories) Wharton’s ghost stories have been filmed marvelously well, in her case by the BBC in the 1980s in a series called Shades of Darkness, produced (naturally) for Christmas. “Bewitched” becomes a vampire-witch story as Eileen Atkins as the grim central heroine (reminding me of the close of Ethan Frome) demands the men in the room drive a stake through the heart of a dead woman said to be appearing to and harassing her worn husband.

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I’m probably not doing justice to the three classes or the stories: nowadays my notes are scarcely readable: my hands cannot hold a pencil tight enough and write the Pitman forms precisely accurately enough to read back all that I am trying to get down — my hands are the ghosts of what they have been. Still I hope I have said enough that is understandable that might lead my reader to read some of these stories and see the movies for yourself.

It’s not true that such matter must be short; the very best I know of are novellas, and if I had the courage, I’d do a course in these five: Margaret Oliphant’s Beleaguered City, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Susan Hill’s Woman in Black, and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly. All but one (Beleaguered City) have been filmed, all but one by a woman,and two of these (Hill House and Woman in Black) have produced the two most frightening the memorable (as in leaving me with nightmare images I am afraid my mind will call up — Hill House, Robert Wise, 1960; and Woman in Black, 1993 BBC). I’d be grateful to any reader of this blog who can cite further novella-long brilliant ghost stories.

Pauline Moran as the terrifying “woman in black,” a woman deprived of her child, who goes about snatching other children — I actually still fear seeing this image at the other end of a room late at night

We have seemed to move away from Winter Solstice or Christmas. So we return to our respectable or seasonal acceptable topic briefly. So why are so many a typical Christmas story also a ghost story? Because as the year closes in, we want to retrieve time, look for redemption for ourselves, but also remember the past with all its pain and loss and seek a way to express this most deeply. We do not look for moral lessons, and pace Trollope, are not longing for stories of charity and forgiveness as such, but only as the latter theme (forgiveness) works itself into what has been so harmful for us across our lives. For the rest of the year the delving into the atavistic parts of the human psyche, condition, experience, Kafka-like (see Jack Sullivan’s little book on ghost stories as “elegant nightmares”) is what ghost stories do.

After all this I cannot say “Merry Christmas!” but I can wish for us all, after the nervous laughter has done its distancing work from the experience of the ghost story (how we ended Miller’s class), hope for us all that the experience of retrieval and redemption Dickens dreamed up and Frank Capra re-caught again will be the one we know.

Now I ask my readers to forgive me: I am very sad this year; the death of my beloved female cat, Clarycat, has made this year, this Christmas, one where I am feeling the years’ losses and wish I could be haunted by her out of her loyal love for me.

Clarycat missing us, photographed close-up during one summer time away for Jim and I

Ellen

The Free State of Jones: a remarkable Civil War & Reconstruction film you must not miss

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:

Ellen

Anatomy of a Fall …. directed, written by Justine Triet, produced Marie-Anne Luciani

Sandra Huller as Sandra Voyter

Friends and readers,

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.

Ellen

Fall syllabus: Trollope’s The Way We Live Now at OLLI at Mason

David Suchet as Melmotte defying Parliament (2001, TWWLN, scripted Andrew Davies)

A fall syllabus for reading Trollope’s The Way We Live Now

Online at:  https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2023/09/13/fall-syllabus-trollopes-the-way-we-live-now-at-olli-at-mason/

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

To begin the process of registration go to:  https://olli.gmu.edu/

Description of Course:

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)

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Suggested supplementary reading & handbook

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

Women in Trollope at Somerville College, Oxford, Sept 1-3; All Trollope All the Time

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.

Millais’ depiction of Mary Lady Mason’s adieu to Penelope Orme

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.

Ellen

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted — a terrifying read

Friends and readers,

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.

Ellen

Late summer: Between Two Worlds and Larkin, Auden, cummings & Cavafy

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.

Now Jim himself is gone into that blue sky. This is very much worth reading on Larkin’s poetry in general.

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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:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that no one loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
no one and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

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Penelope by Angelica Kauffmann

And now Cavafy where Jim had too many favorites but above all there was

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:

A response by Theo Dorgan

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

DC Spring theater: an uneven King Lear; a downright dismaying Anne Karenina

The ensemble for King Lear: Patrick Paige as Lear, Michael Milligan as fool, Shirine Babb as Kent, Matthew J Harris as Edgar

The director and a few of the actors know the deep pessimism and agony of what humanity is, is the core of the play, that it is utterly serious, but the actors have been encouraged to demean and undermine it with coarse humor, and project its impact through the techniques of action-adventure noise & (for the women) sexy costumes

Amanda Assucena as Anna, José Pablo Castro Cuevas as Vronsky

So to sum up, this is a ballet which fails to tell in the most primitive terms the story of the book, caricatures the depths of the characters, leaves out much that counts that could have been used for dance, and emphatically ends on the worst of morals.

Dear friends and readers,

Nonetheless, far be it from me to suggest you should not rush out and see the King Lear (Peter Marks who never does stint praise) being performed at the Klein Theater in DC this spring: after 3 hours of it you will be moved, shaken, at times unbearably rivetted (when the Cornwall and Regan pluck out the eyes of Gloucester there is no flinching). Page has such a resonant voice and thoughtful dignified as well as raging compassionate presence, he probably matches any other performer I’ve seen (that includes Ian McKellen, 2018, and Anthony Hopkins, 2016, the fool played by the inimitable Karl Johnson).

As to the Joffrey’s Anna Karenina, the long central dance sequences of Anna and Vronsky finally making love, of upon marriage and exile from society, him becoming irritated and disdainful, and a later time of ecstasy after a vilifying social experience, a threesome of the two with Edson Barbosa as a raging Karenin probably go as far as dance without moving into pornography and violence can, to figuring the emotions of such encounters. But denuded as it is of everything else in the novel, I do advise rather taking in one of the excellent film adaptations, listening to the book read aloud, or, if all else fails, read the magnificently plausible book.

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I’ve put off writing about the first experience (I saw the Lear two weeks ago now) because I was unwilling to counter the ecstatic screams of praise I’ve seen nearly everywhere on King Lear as it seemed uncharitable. I was aware while watching this (often very young) company how hard they were working. They seemed driven to somehow affect the audience to some overt reaction, and when the three actresses playing Goneril, Regan and even Cordelia, became vulgarly raunchy, with coarse gesturing towards sex, I put it down to eagerness to believe that Shakespeare was not some “solemn dude” Other reductive gleefulness jarred but I do know that there are places where Shakespeare’s King Lear creaks — the opening triadic ritual, Edmund’s awkward self-congratulations, the chronicle-like war scenes near the close are felt and maybe it is salutary for glamorous mystification of audiences to come to an end. But now I know a number of the actors came from a training school or program run by the Shakespeare theater: the company was saving money by not hiring seasoned professionals.

So it is a simply highly uneven production. Patrick Paige is just superb in every way; he has all the nuanced feeling and depth of thought and anger and pathos one looks for and he carried the show. What a resonant voice he has. The actors playing Gloucester (Craig Wallace) , Edgar and Kent were best after him. Edmund (Julian Elijah Martinez) has some quiet sarcastic turns. Most of the others were either adequate or not at all. All three actresses (four by the end) playing the three daughters were either overdone or wooden (let me spare their names). Oftentimes the ensemble was just too noisy, or loud when they mean to be rousing.

Visual motifs that will stay with me: Lear and the fool behind him with a woolen hat and two battered suitcases — this recalled the Lear with Anthony Hopkins with him and the actor playing the fool walking about with a shopping cart and their things in it. The sets were at times inspired and the hard action, and wildness was done well. I’d say see it and get what you can; they work hard and mean well — the deepest feeling came out of the sequences on the heath, the abysmal poverty of the shack they find themselves in. It was terrifying the scene where Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out – done with driving flair; the whole audience was shuddering — a sense of how frequent in our world is torture. A couple of satiric lines over politicians seemed apt for today. A new inspiration was the quiet death of the fool. Hitherto the fool just vanishes in the text and all productions I’ve seen; in this one he dies of cold, and exhaustion and is covered by a tent blanket.

Near the denouement

The very ending scene of most Lears is what we are all waiting for. Page chose to speak the final famous lines over Cordelia’s body so quietly.

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Opening screen and set; intermission showed screen of snowing…

The Joffrey Anna Karenina is another matter. The reviews tell us to go because it’s such a prestigious company; it’s beyond me how the quality of the dancing is something apart from what is represented (we are told to refresh ourselves so as to understand what is faintly represented); and then there’s how these things are done. The point here is to explain what these reviews are avoiding saying.

I have now read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina three times (in two different recent and good translations) and listened to it read aloud superbly well by Davina Porter. I’ve watched at least seven different adaptations. I am aware of just how punitively Tolstoy regards Anna’s behavior, how much the book presents a patriarchal perspective, how it glorifies the holding to conventions (the Levin and Kitty story) and finally slides over the misery of Anna’s sister-in-law, Dolly, at the hands of Anna’s brother, Stiva (played most effectively by Matthew McFayden, 2012) and in Tom Stoppard’s script (2012) But it also shows how ambiguous and distancing is Anna’s relationship with her husband, how needlessly cruel Karenin is over the child, how impossible it is to live apart from a community who will not accept but deride you.

To even begin to get the meaning of this novel, one must have all three couples, and present them in equally understanding ways, which is what Tolstoy did. This Anna Karenina just about omitted the Stiva-Dolly story, and presents the Levin-Kitty story as if there were no downside (and there is in the novel). The Anna dancing scenes presented her too consistently and especially towards the end as simply a victim. Deprived of her son, she is available for kicking. We see her become a drug addict — so the pity that she is ostracized from company is lost. The company chose to have Anna’s death a horror gothic scene, and then turn to a complete joyous ensemble surrounding Kitty and Levin that was like something taken out of Oklahoma, with no sense of humor or boisterousness.

This comes early on; there is no period of doubt where Kitty is attracted to other men

I suppose the worst lack was the omission of the early scenes of Kitty and Levin’s romance take place on an ice-skating pond. I really (perhaps naively) expected some thrilling ballet over ice — or pretend ice. Just about every movie I’ve seen includes these scenes.

They did need to use pantomime for without it there was no understanding why Dolly looked so glum and Stiva useless, helpless. But I read the company is above that sort of thing. The first we saw her son was the scene where Karenin takes the child from her.

There was an effective moment with Anna seen on one side of the stage (in her slip) and Vronsky painting her on the other. They opened on the train station and Anna’s arrival, but her meeting with Vronsky over-rode anything we might learn of Stiva or Anna’s husband. In the closing her image was presented large with the doctor injecting her with some drug over the railway set. She looked ghastly all right. Then we saw her body naked made large on the screen. Maybe spare yourself.

Almost all the reviews show this scene of Karenin presenting Vronsky with Anna

I don’t say this company didn’t work hard and probably the dancing was superbly well done. But long live patriarchy silently screams this ballet. Watch out if you trespass. I went with a friend and we were moved to discuss how in the last couple of years women have lost such ground in the US, not to omit Islamic nations around the world. No woman in the US today should get pregnant: it is too dangerous for her. She said shows how the #MeToo movement is struggling to survive.

Nicola Paggett in the 1977 movie as she walks into the snowy world towards the end of the film; Stuart Wilson was Vronsky; Eric Porter as Karenin. This BBC production remains the best adaptation of Anna Karenina in English; it shows real understanding of the center people.

The Kennedy Center appears to be returning to what it all too often did before the pandemic: get in shows from elsewhere and rely on the glamor of names to pull audiences in.

Ellen

All Creatures Great and Small: Season 3: new levels of grief and comfort and muted gaiety

A photo of Anna Madeley as Mrs Hall and Ella Bernstein as Eva Feldman, an evacuated Jewish child — done so as to evoke 1940s photos

“Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter…” (Anibundel of the first season playing providentially almost just as the pandemic hit)

Dear friends and readers,

This is my third season watching this latest and 3rd iteration of James Herriot’s series of books, All Creatures Great and Small, and, as was to be expected, the matter has taken further turns away from the book. I find not totally to my surprise that I never posted on the first season, only its Christmas special albeit in the context of the series, the original movie and Herriot’s books. I also never posted on the second season as a whole, only giving it honorable mention as among a series of fine women’s films for 2022. This third season I’ve gotten to the point that I watch it as appointment TV, Sunday nights at 9 EST, and then re-watch it on the computer (WETA passport) so as to understand anything I misunderstood and savor it! Indeed, I keep up with Samuel West on twitter about the series, and was glad/relieved to be re-assured it will be back for a fourth season, one which incorporates the realities of World War Two as sifted through its comfort-show lens.

Opening paratexts — not as witty and varied as those of the Durrells but the same sort of entrance gate …

I feel I should say something in praise of it, yet am held back (as I was in previous years) by my sense of its shamelessly softened realities that intellectually I do not fall for, but emotionally cannot resist. The promotional photo put out by the series after the airing of the Christmas special embodies the formula: they offer suggestions of in-depth trauma controlled and distanced by the story and characters’ good natures so as to push the watcher into near tears as we actually watch everything turning out well after all. Anibundel calls it pastoral perfection. Sometimes they can overdo it and in the third season there was more evidence of this, as for example, when they were paradoxically insensitive as they tried to appeal to too many contradictory cultural impulses as in the use of a Jewish evacuated child also to stand in for a Christian child opening her magical presents on Christmas day surrounded by patiently pretending adults. Most of the time they have tact and quick pace enough not to insist on an over-motivated improbable anxiety by Nicholas Ralph as Herriot (still ostensibly the central hero) when confronted by a bullying authority figure; Callum Woodhouse as the boyish Tristan pulls this off much better since at the same time Woodhouse has a presence which remains wryly humorous.

An adequate detailed summary with useful links

Caring care

For me what stabilizes the mix are the many tales of suffering animals, some of whom die despite what is depicted realistically as veterinary care. I can believe in these skeins and cry over people upset because their pets (in effect) need rescue. I must not be the only watcher for whom Mrs Hall is turning out to be as central a character as Siegfried Farnon (seen more fully as a hurt sensitive man by Samuel West previously played somewhat similarly by Anthony Hopkins). They are our caring parent presences. The women remain in their traditional subordinate roles, supportive of their men, while strong in their own right; class status remains respected, ethnicity (British Indians are now added to the black farmers, assistants and one wife we’ve seen).

Siegfried and Mrs Hall dealing with a problem cooperatively

Her finest moment, Episode 4: the reunion with Frederick

I admit up-front last night’s ACGS was over-the-top in two ways and in the third parallel story overdid it (egged the compound so we would understand the theme), yet it touched me intensely, I was in a state of anxiety waiting with Mrs Hall, worried Edward would not come (and when Mrs H returns home and sits down with Siegfried the first question he asks is, “Did he come?”), then I did feel bad for her at his awkwardness, but glad he brought out his accusations. To tell the truth, I’m with him; at the last moment as they walk along towards the train she blurts out “I panicked” — that’s about it. When she discovered he was stealing, she became frightened she’d be blamed, and she needed a place to live, a job. She thinks she loves him above all, but unlike  a parallel Dickens’s text where we are to accept at surface value what Mrs Rouncewell (Bleak House, who also gave up a beloved son to fit into the hierarchical society) says (Mrs R does not say she loves George above everything), there is enough there to show us the son is partly correct in his assessment of Mrs H’s loyalties. She put him in jail. The second story of the weeping older man with his dog who is all the man has in the world did make me cry — alleviated by the comedy (if you can call it that, it was strained) of Siegfried “training” another boy. It was really too much to have Rachel’s younger sister (I think of her as Rachel not Helen) leave school so we could see Rachel show how loyal she is to the child herself — again undercut somewhat by an awareness this is not the best decision — or only if the girl genuinely wants to stay in this small world, which has been made idyllic and which Herriot has chosen when an adult and after a superior education.

His most moving, Episode Episode 3: the backstory killing of all the horses in WW1 still in Siegfried’s mind, told very well by Judith Cheney, a member of Trollope & his Contemporaries @ groups.io

“Siegfried in a flashback memory of the end of WW1, Siegfried was ordered to put down all of the war horses which would not be transported back to Britain. The white or dapple grey horse he killed was the horse in the scene, he & other soldiers found a horse which had been whinnying in pain wounded on the battlefield. They rescued & rehabilitated it. These horse killings had broken S.’s heart & deeply affected him for the rest of his life. (Remember the racehorse episode back a season or two?)

The superior officer who ordered Siegfried to kill all the horses may have been the man whose horse he was now again being told to put down on the Seabright estate – from the dialogue: Siegfried to this racehorse’s owner, ” Oh no you don’t, you’re going to stay & watch it this time.” Siegfried is able to save this horse however, by his gentleness & mounting him bareback, he is able to gallop him off over the hill & thus prove him rideable, with time & proper handling & kindness.”

A couple of recaps told me that this kind of episode where the accent is on sorrow and lost can be complained about — and also that there is more of this in this series than is explicitly appreciated. One trick is to keep the depths in the backstory: we never experience what happened to Mrs Hall and Frederick years ago, and our account of it remains incomplete.

I should say now (about the fakery) — I’ve probably said it before — Yorkshire is NOT eternally green, the skies do not ETERNALLY shine. Beige, brown, grey, yellow — yes some sunny days but certainly not in most of the winter. This is Wuthering Heights country. Rain, cold damp, raw — one of podcasts from WETA about the program has a British person who knows better but never a peep out of her. Wintertime days are very short. Very grey. But nevertheless I love their brightly colored animated paratexts, for Christmas covered with white snow. Flaws include that Woodhouse is getting too old to play the awkward semi-innocent (!) male; and Rachel Shenton as Helen is not given enough to do. The gaiety of the show is supplied by this innocent or overtly young non-predatory male. He is so easily controlled by his new love, the British Indian young woman, Florence Pandhi (Sophie Khan Levy)

The dog is hers

The film story does not yet go overtly into politics, but with World War Two coming up, they cannot slide over the threat of Nazism and fascism; instead they render these things hintingly and as beyond everyone’s conception. I doubt they will ever come near the true explanations of the evil’s facets (as Foyle’s War did and does almost every time): the existence of hopelessness and the need to escape into worlds of destruction would astonish these characters as crazed nightmares are precisely the sort of thing this series is an antidote for. The characters all stand firm in their belief the world is fundamentally a good place. Good medicine is what they mean to offer for those who can enter into the wholesome comfort of bargaining that works out well for almost all.

This is more sheer fun than the show and captures something archetypal about each of the characters:

Ellen