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
Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) and Anna Bates (Joanne Froggart) as series begins
Dear friends and readers,
Most of the time when I watch a TV drama especially I never imagine it was made with me in mind. Due to the proliferation of sites on-line with the whole of the fourth season of Downton Abbey wholly available for watching, yesterday I found shoverdosing on Downton Abbey irresistible. In rhythm it’s more like the first: relatively quiet episodes insofar as action is concerned, but unlike the first there are several developed overarching stories and one (once poor Anna is horribly, violently raped) considerable suspense (will Mr Bates find out who did it and murder the man?). I quickly came across overviews which were critical and dismissive — the series is meandering, getting nowhere — certainly no one is jumping a shark. No humiliating desertions at the altar built up to for our delectation. And there is much introduction of new characters.
But it’s very good in a new way: realistic about life’s tragedies, disappointments, real losses (Albert works hard to become a cook, takes a test and at first seems to have failed against others in a competition). Downton Abbey this time is especially about being widowed — not just our central three, Lady Mary, Tom Bransome and Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton brilliant as a woman who has lost both a beloved husband and only son), but others passing by: Joanne David as a kindly Duchess who tries (but the class barrier too strong) to connect to Tom. You need not marry to be deeply affected by the death of someone: Mr Carter’s erstwhile buddy Mr Grigg (Nicky Henson), ends up in a workhouse, and is rescued by Mrs Hughes (many characters are in this series) to meet with Carson again and tell Carson of one Alice who chose Grig, died young.
The rape of Anna is in uterly keeping with the mood of devastating loss you are seemingly helpless to counteract. For a while she cannot bear to have Mr Bates touch her and comes near to breaking the man by moving back into the house. She acts in character and what many women would still do today: she will not go to the police tells only Mrs Hughes because she must have help, and the man who rapes her is a member of the household and there able to do it again. She becomes a devastated version of the strained Lady Mary the series opens with: ghosts. A repeating image now part of the opening credits is a long shot of Lady Mary at first in black and then in non-mourning clothes walking alone up to the house.
It is not all gravity: Edith falls in love fully with Michael Gregson (Charles Edward) who plans a divorce and turns out to have skills in playing cards with cheating thief (another of these louch lords) and wins back money Lord Grantham can ill spare. I remember other films which show the good person exposing the cheat, dowsing him in a barrel, accusing him, but this was much realer. The cheat left in a hurry knowing he could be exposed — but is not. Elegant entertainment in the form of Kiri Te Kanawa as a visiting opera singer, and Gary Carr as an African-Britsh jazz singer who Rose (Lily James) is attracted to, as well as a kindly working class young man she meets at a dance she gets Anna to take her too.
I found myself utterly connecting again and again.
The dowager (need I cite Maggie’s name?) continues with her wry comments, but they are (as before for those paying attention) as much on behalf of individuals in need as against any structural changes — contests ensue between her and Isobel as Mrs Crawley slowly comes back into activity on behalf of the living. There is still the use of the character motivated by malevolent or asocial and disruptive or class resentment impulses: Rob James-Collier carries on his thankless role (without benefit of Miss O’Brien) this time planting a lady’s maid who seems to be under his control and from whom he forces secrets.
But its reactionary stance is considerably softened as Lord Grantham’s paternal Toryism coincides with Tom’s socialist approach in dealing with tenants. Once Lady Mary emerges from her grief she returns to the old somewhat relentless harder self who would turn tenants out after decades of non-payment. When you get to make up the evidence you can argue anything, and this series is an argument against death duties breaking up the estates of these good well-meaning rich people even if one gov’t employee is quite right when he says of Lady Mary she thinks she’s entitled to this life of a princess. Or maybe in our increasingly fascist environment the program’s continual person-to-person humanity is a relief.
Guess who will provide the third baby for Downton Abbey?
We are no longer in an Edwardian world, but the world of the early 1920s where sex does occur outside marriage more easily. (See Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs). The depression may be what the fifth season will bring.
I say give each episode time; lend yourself to rather like one of the older later 1970s and eary 1980s mini-series with a Chekhovian feel now and again. There has been a change in producer which might help account for the new direction, but it may be Julian Fellowes made a new choice in keeping with a new direction.
I am going away for a week of watching ice-skating in Boston and living in a hotel not too far off and among the books I’m taking is one filled the 8 scripts for the second season and much commentary (and good stills) which I hope to read slowly.
it’s the adults who give the film its heart. Watson is winning as the family’s overbearing matriarch, her strict facade slipping to reveal a trembling core of vulnerability. It’s Rush, though, who steals the show, playing his part with irresistible grandfatherly charm … Barbara Brandenburgh, Des Moines review
My friend, Vivian, and I went to see The Book Thief this afternoon. It’s based on a best selling novel set in Germany in WW2; the film adaptation has received mixed reviews. On the whole the film succeeds in providing the viewers a story of fraught people who live in a repressive society which values discipline, despises and/or distrusts books, and is carrying on a brutal war whose cruelties extend to the civilian population. We see a number of scenes where military police mercilessly beat up Jewish people — and lash out at anyone who protests or irritates them. the population are terrified, cowed, submissive. They fear being taken away and killed.
Like most films, historical or otherwise, it is about today: we see mirrored in it the treatment of civilian populations by heavily armed police all around the world — in the US daily too police kill with impunity. These people under the bombs are us, are which ever body of people in the mideast is now being bombed, are anyone who is droned to death.
In the air-raid shelter
At first the film’s story moves slowly and does not seem to have any inner life or hold together. It’s not clear the little girl has been taken in by the characters Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush play as their adopted daughter. The dialogue is wooden (Petroni’s script leaves a lot to be desired) especially at first, and between the children throughout: the actors playing the children remain stilted, staccato. The actors just don’t seem to make contact with one another.
Then as the story’s events unfold and twist the characters this way and that, a compelling and shaping center does emerge in the triangle of the father (Geoffrey Rush), mother (Emily Watson) and (temporarily?) adopted daughter (Sophie Nelisse). The directing (Brian Perceval) is effective; the settings are so good, they call attention to themselves — the quaint rooms, the basement where a young Jewish boy is hidden; the coloration has a bronze-brown hue over it.
I began to cry strongly when the conscripted father taken away, and the mother, hitherto seeming mostly severely contained and cold, turns into a grieving widow, holding to her his accordion where he makes the few notes of cheer through playing it. Especially effective is the narrative over-voice of death; I thought it was God and found its voiced sentiments (how he loves killing, how peaceful people find it to be dead) electrifyingly perverse. I thought maybe they were miscalculated attempts to give an upbeat ending, but having read about the novel I conclude they are sardonic. It is long but our time with the characters showing them doing and feeling different things, acting, reacting, dying, gives the piece its depth.
The movie conveys the idea that underlying it is a young women’s diary, perhaps written towards the end and slightly after she endured the ordeal of the war, and its ending shows the heroine to be a multi-novel author. The allusion is to Anne Frank, only this heroine survives to have a good life later on (we see her beautiful front room with a piano, photos of her family, daughters); she even reunites with Max, a Jewish young man who was kept in the basement, became sick from its cold and damp and escaped a search just in time.
At the center of the film’s story, the girl becomes “a book thief”because once she learnt to read (taught by the adopted father), she loves books. She comes to the notice of the mayor’s wife who invites her to come to the mayor’s house and library and read books in the library or “taken them out.” The mayor himself one day surprises them and kicks the girl out (as a low person, suspect with a father who is not a Nazi), so after that she sneaks in through a window to “steal” books. She is borrowing them, and returns and takes out books regularly. She reads them to anyone who will listen. She particularly likes a Kipling story whose title include the word “invisible.”
The thrust of the movie as a whole is melodramatic and pious too (the director and script writer are on the right side, have conventional values) but it is not Hollywoodized nor does it exploit the camps. The film shows death everywhere; the picturesque town our characters live in is bombed to smithereens. Its unspoken question: why do people allow others to enforce a desolate life upon them.
Yesterday and in the wee hours of the night I watched two movies I’d like to recommend not missing if you can help it. Both much worth immersing yourself in — thinking about in the case of Twelve Years a Slave and allowing the alluring beauty of the mood and music to bring you in with Moby Dick.
From what I hear other people say to one another, Twelve Years a Slave is misrepresented in ordinary talk somewhat. Since “word-of-mouth” retains its importance in making for a popular movie hit, I’m hurrying a little to write about Twelve Years. If seen by enough people, it could function (mildly) as Uncle Tom’s Cabin once did — this time to help against racial discrimination and racist thinking so prevalent in the US still. People have told me in some areas the film has not opened so maybe I’m precipitantly worrying the film will not be a commercial success. In my area it did open in our local art cinema; the owner rejoiced at getting two prints but it’s already in Theater 4 (smaller and not for continuing hits) and not many people were in the audience yesterday after only a week; and among these were a number of black people, so not many whites in the audience. This theater is not one black people go to much; it’s in an area that’s mostly white, upper middle and attracts art-film audiences. For The Butler I did have to go to Theater 4 but it had been playing for weeks and weeks, all summer in fact, and still the theater (4) was filled and it had a preponderance of white people. The Butler crossed the racial divide. In a nearby theater to me which has large black audiences The Butler was sold out on and off for weeks, long lines of black people waiting to go, early on and then the whites joined them.
Scuttlebutt (or what I’m told or read by friends) is how violent and hard to watch it is. It’s not non-violent and not easy to watch but not because you are shown excruciating torture or close-up shocking violence, nor is this perpetual or at all gratuitous. The violence wreaked on slaves that we see is precisely what will subdue and cow them (not nothing because it’s harsh and includes implicit threats of death), the beatings shown at a distance as (horrifyingly to decent emotions) par for the course, the ordinary routine of treatment for slaves. The coerced sex scenes (on the slaves Patsy played so effectively by Lupita Nyong’o) by the master Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbinder who does steal the movie) are not all that much different from what I’ve seen of half-rape type scenes in (soft-corn implicitly hard sex) movies which don’t name it that. The woman just lies there and lets him.
Patsy asking Plat to help her kill herself
What’s memorable about the scene so many reviewers have mentioned of our hero, Solomon Northrup renamed Plat (Chiwetel Ejiofor) where he’s hung and will die if he does not manage to keep his toes on the ground is how everyday it is, how slaves walk by him unable to help him, how the whites watch and do nothing, and how the supposed “good” master (Bernard Cumberbatch as Master Ford) only comes to cut him down late at night lest he irritate his central over-seer. Ford gives him a violin but will not behave towards him as if he were a human being whose life matters.
Plat rented out to a man who allows him to keep the money he’s paid for his violin playing
Twelve Years a Slave (based remember on a 19th slave narrative, a type or sub-genre) increased my respect for Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (essentially several slave narratives interwoven into a middle class type white novel) and watching it helped increase my respect for that nowadays somewhat under-rated book. It has the same attributed flaws — in the sense that there is a reductive quality, a melodramatic exaggeration going on continually so really the charge hurled at Simon Legree that he’s a monster and no one could be that bad and if he were he’d be an exception can be hurled at Epps.
James Baldwin would not like the way Plat is presented as sheerly noble and insofar as he can be good (see “Everybody’s Protest Novel”); he is not an Uncle Tom; he does not justify a(the character who does this who is popular now is Mr Carson in Downton Abbey) or suck up in his case in the face of horrible mistreatment, but he is an innocent as the film opens. When Solomon is lured to the south, it’s obvious that the two men luring him are crooks; they are over-praising him; he is a simpleton in the scenes. Master Ford as a character is better with his well-meaningness, and his inability to keep Plat, whose opinion Ford consults, thus whose abilities arouse the resentment-hatred of his over-seers slave-servant safe is believable, but numbers of the scenes are too obvious, he won’t help Plat for real, regards Plat as property he must sell to keep his debts down so our moral lesson is clear.
Cumberbatch as the religious ethical man Ford nonetheless showing intense cowardice and lack of real understanding as he briefly explains to Plat why he sells him to Epps
But would such a man sell this man to Epps whom he knows is cruel, sadistic. Epps played as nearly psychotic and seemingly driven by guilt to be even crueller. The central parallel of the two works (Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the film Twelve Years) is this half-crazed white master. Epps is a Simon Legree and his wife a female version. But you do (Stowe and now McQueen) want to make sure the audience gets it.
Sarah Paulson as Mrs Epps riping off Patsy’s ear and taking a chunk out of her cheek with a knife (in Dickens’s Travels in America he easily exposes slavery quoting the ads for finding escaped or “lost” slaves by the scars they are said to have)
Gets what? the key to the film’s power and importance is we see what happens to people who lose all status all caste worth – and in the case of chattel slavery this is reinforced by law which defines them as property. If they should be owned by a mad-man he is allowed to do as he wishes. The point is what law and custom allows. Sure in the Islamic world most men are not ogres, but the Koran and custom allow horrific treatment and power corrupts. People will use power if they are given it even when not as obvious as Legree or Epps.
The film is relevant to us today because today people lose a great deal of status and caste worth depending on how much money they make, the schools they go to, where they live, if they are broke — and worse, if they are immigrants or of a different racial color than the powerful. I was reminded of a book I recently reviewed on global emigration in the 18th century, enforced diasporas, and mass murder, Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora, where the point was made that safety for the average non-powerful non-connected person depends on staying where you are, among relatives or friends and people whose truth or falsehood you can gauge so not be cheated utterly to your destruction with no recourse in courts not made for you. See also David Denby on Twelve Years (from the New Yorker) as best movie on slavery made in the US thus far.
It seems to reflect a book too: there are intriguing sequences which are not part of the plot-driven movement: a group of Native Americans come to dance before the black slaves as if their culture is what slaves will understood. Other curious moments.
The one real flaw in the film is the ending as has been suggested in reviews and conversations I’ve heard. Not so much that Brad Pitt as Bass (a major contributor of money as a first-named producer) gives himself the role of our one abolitionist talker, and the only man to keep his faith with Plat.
Brad Pitt as Bass actually listening to Plat (with exaggerated courtesy)
Plat before this trusts a white overseer who seems to be his friend with money in return for taking a letter to the post office to send to the north to reach friends to help him in court; the man tells Epps so immediately that the man does not have the letter as evidence and Plat manages to persuade Epps (not too bright) that he man is lying:
Half-mad man
The story is improbable Plat persuades Epps, and then we watch Plat burn the hard won paper and writing he did so laboriously with home-made ink and quill.
Bass is a hired architect, an outsider and he does get in touch with authorities up north and friends of Northup — at considerable risk to himself if he’s found out he says.
The flaw begins with how easy it is for the friends to show up & take Northup away. Why did they never look for Northup before? Well, it is true that people were terrified and a reign of terror worked down south (Harriet Martineau’s travels in America books record this) but then it should not have been as easy as we see it for the men to take Northup away Epps should have shot him, would have. We are then not shown the court scenes that would have been another 2 hours but that would have been original and interesting — so let’s hope for a sequel? I doubt it.
The least real moment is the return of Northup to his family. He looks just as innocent and sweet as when he set out. Not haggard, not worn, not much changed at all. His black family is improbably prosperous throughout yet seem to have no connections to anyone black or white outside themselves. All subside into joy in a circle. Plat-Northup keeps apologizing and that makes psychological sense.
I compared the final scene to some photos I’ve seen of Primo Levi when he first returned from concentration camp,haggard, exhausted, not the same ever again. I wondered if a man dragged from freedom to slavery wouldn’t have the same hostage symptoms, the same urges to self-murder and sense of deep humiliation not to be gotten over. We get intertitles to tell us how Northup wrote and published his book in 1853 (Twelve Years in Slavery, and how he worked hard for the underground railway. So he stayed in the US I thought.
But then this quietly ominous final intertitle: no one knows how or when he died or where he is buried. Maybe murdered?
The central performances of male roles as everyone has said are stunningly good. I’ve already named the principles.
As a woman watching I had though to endure the annoyance of women being presented one-dimensionally throughout — except for Patsy the girl who becomes Epps’ concubine; who he beats, who picks heroic amounts of cotton each day — so she is never whipped for under-picking as others are. The two white mistresses are basically either phlegmatic and do nothing (that’s their role) or spiteful: Sarah Paulson Mrs Epps loathes Epps and tries not to have him in her bed, to leave him but he threatens her too – she is a form of his property too (this reminded me of Valerie Martin’s book that won the Orange Prize, Property); Mrs Epps is as sadistic, as sick as her husband, hates Patsy and hurls hard objects at her, knocking her down, cuts her face and ear cruelly, will not let her wash herself so she flees for soap and is gone for a few hours which leads to a horrific scene of Epps beating her and then forcing Plat to do it.
The scene’s reality for the era (keeping clean was difficult) makes one feel it comes from the book — as one of Indians humiliating themselves by dancing as white people expect
We see one black woman who has become a white man’s open mistress: she is fatuous, self-centered, looks down at other blacks. I don’t say these are not human impulses but that’s all we get of these women. A black woman weeps incessantly because parted from her children; another forces herself sexually one night on Plat.
So it’s masculinist movie — Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-39 depicts the terrifying work load and sexual exploitation and cruelty wreaked on women — and their complicated humanity too. And Kemble as mistress identifies with them and within 4 years leaves her husband — she must leave behind her children to do it, only regaining the friendship of one of them in much later years. Such a thinking upright brave type woman is not in the film.
***********************
Which brings me to the opera of Moby Dick where (like Master and Commander out of the Patrick O’Brien books) where no women are in the film — just remembered as embodying civilization itself.
The one women in the cast was playing the boy, Pip, who is almost drowned. Suffice to say it outlined the major hinge-points of the novel (as seen in a play originally with Orson Welles from the 1940s I once saw), and it brought out the meaningful themes: does life have any meaning? who is this haunted creature-fish and Ahab or Ishmael? they are lonely? Is there a God; if so, is he evil incarnate? The music was alluring, the lines resonant to larger meanings we can identify with through generalizations. Like all films it was made for today, with today in mind. The artwork beautifully picturesque:
The production did not emphasize the primal animal-fish (as did Winston Graham in his last Poldark novel, Bella) but human displacement, alienation. The production did seem to suggest that all would have been well but that the captain was mad. (That’s not the note of the Graham novels.) As I recall the book the thrust is all is not going to be well, never has. We see a dream life or men cut off from where they could know happiness as they are driven to make money in this dangerous occupation.
So I loved the deep melancholy of the men, their desperation to bring home some whale oil for money I see as part of human life. I bonded with the man who survives and calls himself Ishmael. He had wanted to go to an island with Queegqueg and live out our lives as best we can; I felt for Mr Starbuck who is nearly shot point-blank by Ahab, and almost shoots Epps on the way. There are the comic undercutting characters too.
And he wouldn’t know, he was tempted
This novel centrally attacks tenets of Christian belief, from justice as always or often done, to stories of an afterlife. These are deliberately not love or dynastic stories. He wanted to be spared.
I bring them together because I watched them within 12 hours of one another, and was struck by the shared masculinity identification. For myself the plangent nature of the music, Ishmael as a person alone in this world resonated enough. I think Jim would have enjoyed the great range of the masculine voices they hired. The lines on the screen and wild waters as the ships turning out from lines, the wild waters — all pulled me paradoxically soothed me. The ending of the tale is tragic as is a good deal of life.
Friday nights on TV contain a revival of the old Great Performances which I remember from my childhood, watching with my father on the old Channel 13: Judith Anderson in Medea, a Chekhov play with a male character who lived in an attic with birds, a sad poet, a bitter absolutely perfect Twelth Night (so that’s what is meant), Peggy Ashcroft, Duchess of Malfi. Now a few weeks ago the four Henry plays, from Richard II to Henry V (and the actors and actresses were great from the extraordinary Ben Wishlaw as Richard (this was Shakespeare I thought — ever autobiographical in my reading), Lindsay Duncan as Duchess of York, David Morrisey as Northumberland, Tom Hiddleston as Henry, Roy Kinnear as Bolingbroke become Jeremy Irons as king, Michelle Dockery (Yay!) as Kate, Hotspur’s wife, Simon Beale as Falstaff, (I saw David Bradley too), magnificently done.
I did not realize the new version allows you to watch a re-run (as it were) as a podcast.
Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov: husband & wife, he died suddenly, age 28, of a heart attack during a practice workshop
Dear friends and readers,
I find irony in my reading, finding some shared thought, and now passing part of the night by writing about Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, which like, the apparently naive My Sergei: A Love Story tells of the sudden death of the author’s beloved husband. Some of the intense distress, exasperation and justified anger I have experienced the last two weeks derives from my husband’s death not having happened with the same single night or moment suddenness as Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Gordeeva’s husband, Sergei. We’ve experienced 3 and 1/2 months of partial truths told us sufficiently to lead our natural desire to clutch at anything to escape malignant esophageal cancer, no matter how horrendous — like an operation to remove someone’s esophagus and re-arrange his digestive tract and other nearby organs which in itself has nothing whatever to do with what causes, spreads, contains, stops the cancer. And equally 3 and 1/2 months of many medical people’s carefully calibrated behavior controlled fundamentally by each person’s desire to protect & advantage his or her career/job while pretending some other motive paramount. From my vantage point today I almost (not quite) feel as I never thought I would before: as the blow was (as one begins to see as one reads) foreseeable, to fall, the four people (husbands & wives) were lucky to have it fall this way.
Didion, Dunne & their adopted daughter, Quintana (ca. 1970s)
Didion’s considered thesis throughout, and Gordeeva’s natural perspective (just at the outset of her book) is “life changes fast, Life changed in the instant.” This is the refrain of Didion’s book sudden instant transformation of everything upon the death of a beloved partner. As she well knows however (this is in the book) her thesis is thin. She tells of how for a year previously her husband had insights and hinted to her he felt he was at risk of death at any time — and that at least a year before he’d had a bad heart attack and was now living by using an implanted pace-maker. So (like say Causabon in Middlemarch or “young” Jolyon in To Let of the Forstye Saga) she did know he was in danger – or ought to have taken seriously a doctor’s outright warning.
Didion’s book is initially, and every time she recurs to the shock of the scene of Dunne’s sudden keeling over during dinner, powerful. Her book is recursive. She has two further traumatic sudden near deaths incidents to retell. Twice in the book her daughter comes near death: it escaped everyone that a viral infection of a few days before Xmas, because not x-rayed in the hospital the night Quintana came (as it ought to have been) was a serious flu which then (as Dunne said) morphed into an episode of pneumonia that came near killing Quintana too. Quintana later collapses on an airport tarmac as she is being triumphantly coming home; a paralyzing seizure nearly carries Quintana off. It’s one of those real shocks often talked of (“in comparison” to what we usually watch on TV), including the death before your own of your own child.
After the initial power of the husband’s death, there is this falling off as if Didion’s casting about for what to say next and repeats herself, and I feel there is too obvious a sense of this is another occasion for making a book. It picks up roaring as she moves back to her daughter’s two encounters.
Speed of transformation through illness is important, even if common. We do not go about expecting a hammer to come down on our heads. ON one level, my husband Jim seems to have been transformed from recovering slowly from a drastic operation and and then recurrence of cancer diagnosis (liver, “the worst” someone said) inside a week — to man seemingly near death, weak, frail, fatally ill; then I could say it’s been only 3 months since the initial diagnosis, but I know that before that last autumn he had stopped going to the gym gradually and I saw was somehow not himself, not physically well, suddenly looking older. We had no clue to run to the doctor to check with — though he did go for his legs and other things but the problem was not where he was feeling. Engineering term: the point of origin is often not the same as the place of manifestation; one’s bottom body is tired (manifestation) because a cancer is growing in one’s throat (origin, cause).
Her second theme is her magical thinking: once her husband dies, she plays games with her mind. After his death, she asks him for advice and pretends he’s there. She stays away from places which will evoke deep emotional reactions; or if she goes, she plays games in her mind to avoid thinking about that. She can tell us the next morning magical thinking relieved from having to be realistic. Myself I think the term is capable of wider application. Because a hospice person is in the house, you might feel your relative or beloved is safer. He or she isn’t, statistically. We think magically when we rely on rituals. My grandmother tied onions to my feet when I was 3 and came down with a high fever; she was drawing the evil spirits out of the foot. I had a hard time removing the apnea monitor off my younger daughter because I had begun to believe it was saving her. If we do X, Y will surely occur. Make a rain dance, and it will rain. Pray for X, and you may get it (prayers are magical thinking). Human beings attempting to control the natural world.
Yet we do this faced with imminent or present death. But she does not adequately explore kinds of magical thinking (nor the dangers of atavistic behavior they bring), though she shows her wisdom in she defending those people who in need use magical thinking.
Joan, John, and Quintana at home
Other superficialities: She’s not deep about anything beyond these moments. Beyond no real truth-telling about troubles in her life, she presents hers as a life of utter privilege upper class American (she can commandeer a plane and helicopter to take her daughter across the US from California to NY), all the right schools are gone to by all three people (husband, wife, daughter). In the middle of the book she does not want to talk frankly about her family and its realities so she is without matter since she has no criticism to make of attitudes or the medical establishment either.
It reminds of Carolyn Heilbrun’s autobiographical essay in not being willing really to tell and like Heilbrun Didion presents her life as simply happy; Didion tells more but not enough so there’s nothing gripping. We hear of the dinners she goes to (with famous names dropped). She never questions the values that support her privileges; apparently she lived very conventionally inside a small circle of wealthy family and semi- and famous friends. Hints of darker interpretations here and there of their privileged lives, of antagonisms within her relationship with Dunne, especially from her husband’s remembered words, are left on the surface of the narrative. This problem did not arise in the earlier masterpieces (e.g., Salvador) since she was not personally involved.
Life-writing is demanding in ways many writers won’t submit to. They’re afraid – maybe rightly – of the public.
But then her strengths: her style is as marvelous as I remembered it (in Salvador). She never forgets the literal meaning of her words and so has quiet ironic fun with the language medical personnel use. At Xmas she is told Quintana “may not leave the table.” Of course she must leave the table; what she may not do is be taken off it alive. She makes quiet fun of the stilted euphemistic jargon language, the sticking to a high enough level of generality so nothing is acknowledged. Since contained in her words are a thoughtful critique of this language one can’t fault it, but looking at it tonight from my perspective I’d say she can do this since she did not suffer directly from it beyond the “mere” having useful information withheld, nothing explained. Neither she nor her husband were dependent on the medical community as except afterwards (and then he was dead).
It’s not many people who can write of their intimate thoughts while grieving. In the later parts of the books she talks of how she tried to compensate and cope; she speaks of her memories that were good and she helped me sitting there here in my workroom last night to try to relive happy memories. I mentioned some to my husband much later at night (3 am when we were in the front room) who was sitting across from me in his now usual half-stupor and bewildered, unconscious, hallucinating (from all the drugs he’s given for this and that) and he appeared to understand what I was saying. He smiled and corrected a song I said I liked from the 1970s which came to me at that moment as about us:
Only he attributed it to the The Who.
A Year of Magical Thinking is mostly a superb book, deeply felt in many ways, but what makes it is the feeling that what she tells of the traumatic incidents (three) in the book are literally authentic, true, how it happened and her usual bag tricks of style from her interest in literal and playful words (and names), in ironies, and ability to write windingly graceful involved kinds of sentences that are yet readable.
*******************
I did not know until I finished and looked at some reviews that Didion’s Quintana whose near-death experiences (two of them, frantic emergencies coming “out of the blue”) provide some ballast for her book — she can include the girl’s childhood through memory flashbacks too – her daughter died in a third seemingly bizarre episode before The Year of Magical Thinking was published. She would not change her book, but instead wrote about the daughter’s calamitous fatal experience of pancreatitis in her next book. I can’t help wondering if there are not aspects of her daughter’s situation that led to 2 times getting to the hospital nearly too late (the 3rd, in the book) is more than the result of errors and infections/blood clots caused by hospital people not doing or doing their job, in this case too cautiously.
So Blue Nights is about her loss of the daughter, an adopted only child. I’ve bought a copy for $3.45 despite several vows to buy no more books now that I’m not going to have someone with me to shoulder the burden of so many or read and use them together in a universal of our own making. I’ll get to it after Ekaterina Gordeva’s My Sergei, co- or ghost-written by E.M. Swift.
Ekaterina was left with a small daughter by Sergei: Daria
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 