tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51464995263681544912024-03-09T00:26:56.857+00:00Sarah ChurchwellSarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-9106115399784224362012-02-11T09:43:00.002+00:002012-02-11T09:47:48.144+00:00What Makes Gatsby Great - Times October 2009<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> 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<w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="19" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Classic novels are usually classic for good reason: they offer memorable characters, gripping plots, intricate psychology, compelling history, linguistic brilliance. But surely very few novels can claim to have glamour. Actually I can think of only one: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Great Gatsby. </i>First published in 1925, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gatsby </i>continues to dazzle readers today—even to inspire parties, which can’t be said of many novels (try throwing a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Bleak House </i>party, or having guests come as their favorite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">1984 </i>character).<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> </i>But what exactly makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Great Gatsby </i>so, well, great? <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Gatsby </i>is a connoisseur’s guide to the glamour and glitter of the Jazz Age—but it’s also a nearly prophetic glimpse into the world to come. Writing at the height of the boom, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald detected the ephemerality, fakery and corruption always lurking at the heart of the great American success story. Four years later, the market would crash—but the age of advertisement that Fitzgerald was among the first to condemn had only just begun. <span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Geneva">Nearly a century later, his cautionary tale has become all too apt once more, anticipating as it does our own boom and bust, our tarnished dreams and tawdry failures.</span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Although slight—about 50,000 words—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Great Gatsby </i>is well-known for its style and shimmering beauty. But although <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Gatsby</i> is a haunting meditation on aspiration,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>disillusionment, and romantic love, it<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> </i>isn’t just a lovely cipher, the novelistic equivalent of Greta Garbo. It’s also a blistering exposé of the materialism, duplicity, and sexual politics driving what Fitzgerald calls America’s true “business”: “the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.” <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">And this is precisely the business of Fitzgerald’s hero, the farm boy who reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby, who “sprang from a Platonic conception of himself.” Gatsby epitomizes the self-made man; Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, says talking to Gatsby is “like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.” Gatsby tries to create his own fortune in every sense—but although he can make money, Gatsby can’t make destiny. What makes Gatsby none the less “gorgeous” to Nick is his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” That heightened sensitivity is shared—and transmitted—by the novel. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">It might seem startling that a novel so rooted in time has become so timeless: the story takes place across the summer of 1922, and ends tragically in September, as the leaves are falling and death is in the air. Time is seasonal, suggesting history, mortality, perishability and impermanence. Gatsby wants to recapture the past, recover lost opportunities, even as he chases “the orgastic future” (it is not, incidentally, the “orgiastic future,” as so many editions print it). Fitzgerald sensed even then that the orgastic future would never come: and he was right. What would come were Crash, Depression, World War, and Holocaust—all so catastrophic they would be capitalized. Gatsby may be a product of his age, an American emblem of hope, faith, and self-fashioning—but he is also our tragedy, a universal symbol of the impossibility of those hopes, and the poignant grandeur of splendid failure.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">All of which Fitzgerald understood. When he composed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gatsby,</i> Fitzgerald was one of the most successful writers of his era, who had shot to fame with two bestselling novels (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">This Side of Paradise </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Beautiful and Damned</i>), and was the highest-paid short story writer of the decade. He’d been young, brash, ambitious; when he became his own success story he won Zelda Sayre and the pair rapidly<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>became legendary for their revels, the incarnation of the “flappers and philosophers” who populated the Jazz Age—the name Fitzgerald himself bestowed upon the era he and Zelda would forever embody.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">But Fitzgerald also had serious artistic ambitions, and in 1924 he set out to write “a consciously artistic achievement.” Published in the spring of 1925, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Great Gatsby </i>barely sold out its first printing, and Fitzgerald didn’t live to see its pre-eminence recognized.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"> </i>It received some good reviews, while a few great older writers, including T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton, recognized its significance. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gatsby</i> was generally dismissed by its first readers as trivial, an “anecdote,” in the dismissive opinion of influential critic H. L. Mencken.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">There were two primary reasons for this critical lapse: first, the novel was so much of its time that its first readers couldn’t see beyond its topicality; it seemed so much ephemera. And second, Fitzgerald was perceived as a popular writer, not a serious artist. It wasn’t until the 1950s that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gatsby </i>began to be recognized as a tour de force, in part because Fitzgerald’s prescience could only be appreciated in hindsight. By then it had become clear that he wasn’t merely farseeing, he was himself an uncanny incarnation of America’s fortunes: just as Fitzgerald rode in on the Boom of the 1920s, he would crash with the Bust, despair in the Depression, and die just as America entered the Second World War.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The greatness of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gatsby</i> derives not only from Fitzgerald’s perceptiveness, however, but also from his astonishing prose. The novel is so vivid in part because its language is so consistently surprising: “The world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.” Only in Fitzgerald do people “twinkle hilariously” on lawns. He is painting with words, using bright shocks of color like a prose Fauvist. In Gatsby’s “blue gardens,” Nick says, “the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher”. A woman whose husband is drunkenly flirting appears at his side “like an angry diamond.” It is world of “triumphant hat-boxes,” and low-slung cars “crouching” in garages—a single word suggesting the danger that cars will pose to the novel’s characters. The almost synaesthetic mixing of sensory effects creates impressionism in prose, evoking an image without getting trapped in the prison of realism—precisely the trap into which Gatsby himself falls.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Bringing objects to vivid life doesn’t just enable Fitzgerald to set the scene—it allies the reader with Gatsby, who inhabits a world of enchanted objects. Daisy is the most important: she represents the lost paradise Gatsby seeks, but however rich he becomes Gatsby will never be able to afford her. The only man who can afford Daisy is her fabulously wealthy and even more careless husband Tom Buchanan. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Viewed cynically, Gatsby is a stalker—he falls in love with his own projections onto Daisy, refuses to accept rejection, and spends his life constructing an elaborate fantasy, trying to force a happy ending. But Fitzgerald aligns cynicism so firmly with the repellant Tom and his unlikeable (if pitiable) mistress Myrtle Wilson, that unless we want to join the likes of Tom and Myrtle, we have to choose romance<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">. </i>When Nick shouts to Gatsby at story’s end that “they’re a rotten crowd” and Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch put together,” he speaks for us. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Great Gatsby </i>makes hopeless romantics of us all.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">And hopeless romanticism is the book’s great theme: Gatsby’s glorious romance with possibility itself—and the tragedy of wedding such “unutterable visions” to anyone’s “perishable breath”.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Gatsby’s dreams may “romp with God,” but they are corrupted by materialism. As Fitzgerald understood, realizing a dream is sufficient to kill it; and so he keeps the novel’s romantic dreams indescribable. Instead of insisting upon the power of communication, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gatsby </i>is littered with words like “unutterable” and “uncommunicable,” sustaining the novel’s romantic intensity through suggestion. Populating the novel with “owl-eyed” characters and giant unblinking eyes on billboards, Fitzgerald invokes vision but also suggests that it can be unseeing, a signboard rather than a sign.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Gatsby dwells in possibility, to borrow a phrase from Emily Dickinson: his visions are fragile, ineffable, numinous; he is destroyed not by the dreams, but by “the foul dust” floating in their wake. Gatsby is a visionary whose world is inadequate to his romantic intensity.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">In the novel’s unforgettable ending, Fitzgerald makes clear that if his story is American, it is also a universal tale of human aspiration, of our facility for hope, and for wonder. Nick wanders to the shore and imagines Dutch sailors seeing America for the first time, a moment when man came “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” It is his desire to be great, his craving for “the incomparable milk of wonder,” that makes Gatsby great. And it is Fitzgerald’s ability to evoke that incomparable wonder without diminishing its enchantments that makes the novel so wonderful itself. We can, in fact, come face to face with something commensurate to our capacity for wonder once more: when we read the wonder that is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Great Gatsby.<o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><i>First published in the </i>Times, 1 October 2009. (c) Sarah Churchwell. All rights reserved.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><o:p> </o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-14197061179668844352012-01-23T19:47:00.002+00:002012-01-23T19:48:36.124+00:00A Fitzgerald Holiday PoemLetters of Note has lately been publishing some Fitzgerald letters that the blogosphere seems to be enjoying. They are, in fact, mostly rather well known to Fitz afficionados. Some of my favorites, however, are much less well known, so I am going to try to blog some Neglected Fitz on my Neglected Blog.<div><br /></div><div>Here is an exchange of which I am very fond:<br /><div><div><br /></div><div>The Fitzgeralds' great friend from Great Neck, Ring Lardner, sent them a Christmas poem one year (Fitz's handwritten annotation at the end dates it in either 1927 0r 1928):</div><div><br /></div><div><img src="webkit-fake-url://4941796F-303A-43B7-851C-0BFD9C190257/image.tiff" /><br /><div><br /></div><div>Fitz responded in kind, with one of his many witty poems. </div><div><br /></div><div>Here is Fitz's rejoinder to Lardner:</div><div><br /></div><div><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">You combed Third Avenue last year</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">For some small gift that was not too dear</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">—Like a candy cane or a worn out truss—</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"> To give to a loving friend like us</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">You’d found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"> As the Edsell Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">The Coleman T. and Pierre duPonts</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">But not one gift to brighten our hoem</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">—So I’m sending you back your God damn poem.</span></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1px; text-align: center; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; "><br /></p><div style=" ;font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman', serif;">More Fitz Favorites anon ...</span></div></div></div></div></div>Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-53436171163130921862011-06-08T09:25:00.004+01:002011-06-08T09:36:27.784+01:00*Further Information on NCHAfter posting the below, I was sent the following article by @carolinepennock on Twitter. It does seem to change the game; I don't have time at present to think through all the implications, but it means that Grayling is indeed doing something new, that may well be meretricious. On the other hand, it may be a necessary step to surviving in an increasingly commercialized world: I'm not sure.<div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/new-private-university-10m-placing">http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/new-private-university-10m-placing</a><br /><div><br /></div><div>What I am sure of is that Grayling has become another Clegg: a public whipping boy for implementing the repellent policies of David Cameron.</div><div><br /></div><div>Grayling's quotations in the British press over the last few days have also not lessened my qualms: if he isn't being misquoted, they seem pretty outrageous.</div><div><br /></div><div>Others have pointed out that the more worrying model is University of Phoenix, not Harvard. I agree, but U of Phoenix hasn't ruined all of US Higher Ed. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet. Sigh.<br /><div><br /></div><div>My reservations are growing exponentially by the moment, but I still counsel wait and see.</div></div></div>Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-41396548744205810992011-06-08T08:27:00.006+01:002011-06-08T12:16:50.321+01:00Thoughts on the New College for the Humanities<style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Baskerville; panose-1:2 2 5 2 7 4 1 2 3 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Optima; panose-1:2 0 5 3 6 0 0 2 0 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Baskerville; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Baskerville; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span> <p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; ">As an American who has been an academic in the UK for 12 years, let me see if I’ve got this straight: everyone wants (the right) to attend the best universities that money can buy, but no one wants to pay any money. And when a new college announces that it will charge the rich what it actually costs to attend universities, people are baying for its founders’ blood?<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; "><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; "> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; ">Since the announcement of the proposed New College for the Humanities, Twitter has been awash with righteous indignation expressed with all the depth and complexity afforded by 140 characters and the ease of the retweet, which means you don’t have to do any arguing at all. Academic bloggers have been proposing ‘greylisting’ and boycotting those involved with the project (raising the age-old philosophical conundrum: if you’re boycotted by the unknown will anybody care?). Its founders are accused of being financially motivated, in which case they are stupid: if you want to get rich open an investment bank, not a university. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Take Terry Eagleton’s piece for CiF yesterday: his facile argument was based on a press release, a half-built website, some hasty journalism, a great many unsupported suppositions, and a straw (bogey)man in the shape of the looming spectre of the sinister US education system to terrify us all with the prospect of turning into a country with some of the finest universities—both public and private—in the world. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Eagleton’s argument relies in part upon a gross oversimplification of the US system, which has operated for generations by means of a highly complex mix of private and public funding. The US doesn’t have a two-tier system: it’s more like a 20-tier system. All the tiers charge tuition fees of some kind, and all of them agree to waive varying portions of those fees, for varying reasons and under varying circumstances, while offering and receiving varying subsidies from varying funding bodies; the costs are scaled according to excellence, yes, but also to size, financial need, academic merit, and location, among other factors. Meretricious, isn’t it?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">What the US system does have in common with the UK is that most of its state-funded universities are in grave financial difficulty, in part because both nations are populated by those who fervently believe in the principle of universal education and just as fervently object to paying higher taxes or tuition fees. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Nor are the US “private liberal arts colleges” that Eagleton decries (some of which he hasn’t been above working for) the nefarious corporate puppets of his and other similarly cartoonish portraits: they are all funded in great part by voluntary alumni donations from individuals—by no means all billionaires in search of a tax break. Ordinary Americans routinely give back to their universities, when they can, if they choose, because they understand that such educations actually entail huge costs—in both human and material resources. (Anyone who wants to understand the quandaries facing universities on both sides of the Atlantic might better begin with Louis Menand’s surgically precise essay <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand">“Debating the Value of College in America”</a> in this week’s New Yorker, rather than Eagleton’s simplistic diatribe.)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">There has been an enormous conflation in the coverage of the NCH story among the meanings of "private,” "commercial" and "for-profit." Private universities – just like private secondary schools, such as Eton, Westminster, or St Paul’s - can be publicly inspected, publicly accountable, not-for-profit, but primarily funded by tuition fees. Some people may well feel that the last thing the country needs is more private education on this model, but what Grayling is proposing is hardly revolutionary, or unheard of here. It has been likened to Buckingham, which is just silly: the point about Buckingham, in my understanding (I have no direct knowledge of it, so this is simply hearsay) is that it requires little to no academic qualifications for entry, and simply admits anyone who pays the cash. What Grayling is proposing is not like Buckingham but like Eton: expensive, independent, and high-quality education. People may not like it, but there is a clear and highly functioning model for it in this country.*</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">And if “private” simply means “independent,” is independence really by definition "odious," in Eagleton’s word—especially in an era when the government is stabbing its own political and economic agenda into the heart of the academy? One of the benefits of such independence is that the government can’t claim the (purchased) right to determine which subjects should be taught, how to teach them, or to set largely useless measurement systems such as the REF (to the tune of wasting about £2 billion of the education budget) or, as in the case of the current government, create incentives in violation of the Haldane Principle for funding bodies to reward those universities that align their research with the government’s “Big Society” initiative. The government’s “public funds” come to universities with enormous strings attached—otherwise known as enough rope to hang ourselves with.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Let’s be clear about one thing: the people selling the study of humanities down the river in this country are not academics like AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins who have devoted their lives to research and education—they are in Whitehall, where it has been agreed on both sides of the political aisle that only the so-called STEM subjects will be publicly funded. The government already plans to withdraw all public funds from the teaching of the humanities and rely solely upon fees-paying students to finance it anyway. So in what way is the NCH the party guilty of “selling out the humanities”? At the very least, it is saying that the study of the humanities is worth paying £18,000 a year for. Terry Eagleton thinks he should get his socks ironed for paying that much money: perhaps that’s because when he got his free education, it was at the expense of thousands of taxpayers in this country who never went to the universities they subsidized him to attend. No wonder he expects to get his boots polished, too. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">As far as I can see, the accepted position of principle in the UK today is that every taxpayer should pay to support universities, regardless of whether they or their relatives have ever sought or been granted a university place, in the hopes that they might one day get such a place, or to protect their notional right to access it some day. Meanwhile, as we all know, the reality is that thousands of academically qualified students are currently being denied university places that their families’ taxes have helped pay for.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">How is that prima facie a less “odious” system than charging the rich directly to pay for the education they actually receive—especially if (and this is a crucial caveat) that tuition is used to subsidize the educational opportunities of the disadvantaged? How is that less “odious” than the rich receiving a <span style="font-style: italic;">free</span> education and the poor <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">still </i>being boxed out? Rumor has it that the money middle-class parents are currently saving on university fees, after they’ve become accustomed to paying for private schools, is being turned into cash to buy London property, thus further squeezing the poor out of the avenues of access to upward mobility. This “free” education everyone wants has very high costs, but no one wants to admit it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">In 2004 the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Times Higher Education Supplement </i>reported a think tank’s finding that it costs £21,000 a year to educate a single Oxford student. Those costs will have risen since—so if its teaching and research are of equivalent quality (again, an important if), the NCH would in fact be offering a discounted rate. Similarly, I am not certain where Eagleton learned that Grayling et al will be “drawing down mega-salaries” from this initiative—all I have seen is that they will be offering academics 25% above the going rate, which currently starts at just over £27,000. By my calculations this means Grayling’s traitors to the cause of education will start with “mega-salaries” of around £34,000. Compare that with GPs, who are being incentivized to manage their own practices, and routinely earn well over £100,000 annually.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Grayling has been quoted saying he intends for NCH to learn from the US model—which doesn’t use fees to enrich shareholders. I have seen no evidence that NCH—a registered charity according to its website—proposes to do so, either. (*NB: This evidence has been shown to me since this writing: see post above.) Let’s also bear in mind that “learning from” a model doesn’t necessarily mean replicating it: it can, and should, mean improving upon it. Grayling has said explicitly that he intends to use the high tuition fees to subsidize the poor and widen access to university study. At present, NCH says 20% of its students will be on financial support, which isn’t nearly enough; when I said so on Twitter, it responded to me that it intends to increase that number, and that it has set up a charitable trust to offer more support. We will need to see just how much support that is. If NCH turns out to be for-profit, or if in practice it admits only the rich and squeezes out the poor, then it will fully deserve condemnation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">But it is also the case that, should NCH only admit the rich, white boys who didn’t get into Oxford and think <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">that’s</i> unfair (if they want to think about injustice, they should consider structural poverty—but then again, they haven’t been admitted to university, so they probably don't know what structural poverty is), there are ways to pressure institutions other than with funding. To wit: if private universities begin to mushroom, the government could refuse accreditation to any university that doesn’t achieve minimum standards of diversity--otherwise known as a minimum standard of decency.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Not that this government has any intention of doing any such thing: their entire agenda has been calculated to create just such institutions as this. Of course they want to privatize universities—but that needn’t be the same thing as commercializing them, and the fact is that there are advantages to independence, as I mentioned above. At the moment, UK universities have the worst of both worlds: all the pressures of fundraising and none of the autonomy to set their own intellectual agenda. In fact, the government rigs the game even more crassly than most people realize, because they cut funds and then limit both student fees and student numbers, and tell us to make up a shortfall. How would we do that, if they won’t give us more money, we can’t charge the students more money, and we can’t admit more students, you ask? Good question. The only way is by getting external funds—of exactly the kind that Grayling is being denounced for having raised. It is what every “public” university in the country is currently scrambling to do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">anyway.</i> Most universities I know would give their eye-teeth to have venture capital behind them.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">There are legitimate questions being asked of NCH about how much teaching its starry professoriate will actually do, and about the apparent lack of diversity among NCH’s big names (as one of my academic friends on Twitter put it, they “look far too male and crusty”; they also look overwhelmingly white). It needs to defend its evident use of the intellectual property of others, including the alleged lifting of syllabi from other institutions. Its relationship to the facilities and infrastructure of publicly funded universities needs to be clarified, and I wish that an institution with aspirations to excellence had given more obvious thought to its curriculum: I’m not convinced by any definition of “Humanities” that doesn’t stretch far enough back to include Classics, or far enough forward to recognize that, for example, “American literature” cannot be apprehended sufficiently in a final-year semester. It will need to clarify the qualifications of its students and the promotion criteria for its staff: what, for example, will the role of research be in Grayling’s brave new world? The importance of funded independent research to the academic excellence of the Ivy Leagues cannot be overstated. Most important, it needs to clarify whether it will in fact just happily accept the children of the rich, and ignore the children of the poor, in which case I will be at the front of the picket line.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">None of these questions have yet been answered: nor have we given them a chance to do so. The public outcry over the last few days to the simple announcement of an educational initiative has been characterized by hysteria, inflamed outrage, and reflexive denunciation, and even, Twitter tells me, a protest meeting the other day, which seems a trifle premature, to say the least. What happened to the reasoned consideration of a case on the basis of actual evidence?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Personally, I’m going to wait for such evidence before I draw conclusions. As Mary Beard blogged after the announcement<a name="_GoBack"></a>: "I have to confess to some sympathy with this: if there is to be a sustained assault on the humanities, then maybe someone has to get off their ass and take the teaching into their own hands; and if there are to be more and more central demands from central government (many of them tick-box, but still hugely time-consuming), then maybe one simply has to set up a new show outside of all that silliness." She then tweeted that she was going to wait and see, “with reservations.” In the spirit of Professor Beard’s classicism let me just add: Ditto.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Higher education in the UK today is in a parlous state, as no one knows better than those of us who work in it. The NCH is trying something different, and the nation is rushing to judgment. Actually, it is rushing to tar and feather. Maybe what the NCH is doing will indeed prove odious; if they further erode the already fragile state of the study and teaching of the humanities in the UK—and its availability to any able student regardless of financial means—I will oppose them as fiercely as anyone. But shall we learn a bit more about what they’re trying to achieve, and how they propose to achieve it, before we greylist, boycott, or hang them in effigy?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-style: italic;">Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at UEA. She is also an Ivy-League educated American.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">*<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Since I wrote this piece, on Monday 7 June, further information has been brought to my attention showing that Grayling does indeed intend NCH to be at least partially for-profit. This is a different kettle of fish. I have offered a few quick thoughts and links in the next post, but they are sketchy at best...</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Copyright © 2011 Sarah Churchwell. All rights reserved.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"> </p>Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-74253454044603059522010-09-24T07:08:00.003+01:002010-09-24T10:34:40.966+01:00Happy Birthday FitzToday is F. Scott Fitzgerald's 114th birthday, and in honor of the event, I want to take the opportunity to refute a story that has become accepted as truth but is in fact a complete myth, the idea that Hemingway told Fitz that the rich are only different from you and me because they have more money.<br /><br />Here is what actually happened:<br /><br />In 1926, Fitzgerald wrote a story called "The Rich Boy," which opens: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." The point of the story is to see how extreme wealth can ruin people (and if you think he's wrong, just think about Michael Jackson.)<br /><br />Some years later, Hemingway was at a dinner with the editor he shared with Fitzgerald, Max Perkins, and an Irish writer named Mary Colum, a woman with a sharp wit. Hemingway said at the dinner: "I am getting to know the rich" (primarily by marrying them, but, hey, that's one way). Mary Colum said to him: "The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money."<br /><br />In 1936, Fitzgerald published the Crack-Up essays in Esquire, and Hemingway took the opportunity to deride him in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", also published in Esquire later that year, as "poor Scott Fitzgerald," who was in "awe" of the rich and had written a story saying "the very rich are different from you and me," and how "someone" had told him, "Yes, they have more money."<br /><br />Ever since, Hemingway has been credited with the line but it was used against him. We know this because soon after the dinner Perkins wrote a letter to a woman named Elizabeth Lemmon telling her what had been said at the dinner, because he thought Hemingway's behavior was beneath contempt. Some think Hemingway did it in part because he hated being bested by a woman; certainly his rivalry with Fitzgerald drove him to more and more malicious mythmaking.<br /><br />The truth of this story can be found in most of the Hemingway biographies, as well as the letters and biography of Max Perkins, and of course the Fitzgerald biographies, for example <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=G5EXJ_m2n10C&pg=PA409&dq=hemingway+%22mary+colum%22&hl=en&ei=xkKcTNmhEoKSswaDwajmDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=hemingway%20%22mary%20colum%22&f=false">here</a>.<br /><br />While I'm at it: no one who knew Fitzgerald well believed that he asked Hemingway to check out his, erm, manhood at a Parisian restaurant to make sure he was properly endowed, as Hemingway claimed in A Moveable Feast. This is pure Hemingway machismo, just the kind of pissing contest he loved to invent. It is just possible that Fitz might have done it if he were very drunk (which of course happened a lot), when he was capable of all kinds of outrageous behavior. But in general he was sexually somewhat prudish and homophobic. He was raised a Victorian after all. So it's possible, but unlikely.Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-2350678624317231082010-07-31T02:19:00.000+01:002015-08-08T17:40:37.698+01:00A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (Review)<span style="font-family: lucida grande; font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Here is the full text of my review of A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, which was cut for space. (Times 5 June 2010)
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Review by Sarah Churchwell</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>A Moveable Feast, </i>first published in 1964, three years after Ernest Hemingway committed suicide, opens with a Preface stating: “For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and someone were known by everyone.” Thirty-five years later, Hemingway’s grandson Seán has published what he calls the “Restored Edition” of <i>A Moveable Feast, </i>including exactly those observations and impressions that were left out of the original.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The justification for this decision is that the omissions in the original were not, in fact, “the writer’s,” but rather, the posthumous editor’s. And she just happened to be the writer’s fourth wife, Mary. Given that the memoir tells the story of Hemingway’s Edenic years in Paris in the early 1920s with his first wife, Hadley, and ends with his leaving her for his second wife, Pauline, it is just possible that Mary wasn’t entirely impartial. Unfortunately, neither is Seán—as he is none other than Pauline’s grandson, and has put this “restored” memoir together with the stated intention of correcting its representation of her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This has provoked some predictable criticism—but the irony is that the restored edition adds little about Pauline, and some of it is even more critical than in the original. Seán claims in his preface that the new book will show how much Hemingway loved Pauline; instead it shows that at the end of his life he remembered a mixture of love, happiness, and unhappiness in a marriage that lasted for thirteen years. This wouldn’t seem to require much proof.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Seán’s preface repeats twice in two pages that “Hemingway thought of his relationship with Pauline as a beginning, not an ending.” In fact, what the draft shows is Hemingway saying that the story of Pauline is properly the beginning of the next book: “I wrote it and I left it out. It is intact and it starts another book”. In other words, the defense of Pauline on display here is that Hemingway intended to write another book about her, but this isn’t it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The restored version includes drafts, sketches and “fragments” of drafts that the original Feast omitted, but which have long been available to scholars; it re-arranges some sections, but it excises nothing from the original. Instead, it returns to the historical record the (undeniable) fact that <i>A Moveable Feast </i>was very much unfinished when Hemingway died. The resulting book is a looser, baggier, open-ended <i>Feast—</i>rather like a postmodern version of a modernist classic. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For the first two-thirds, one needs to remember the original well to register most of the changes. For example, “A Strange Enough Ending” tells of the end of Hemingway’s friendship with Gertrude Stein. In the original, he attributes it solely to inadvertently overhearing an unpleasant exchange between Stein and her “friend” Alice B. Toklas (speaking “as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever”), which so shocks tough-guy Hemingway that he ends the friendship. The restored version adds a little fillip, which frankly sounds much more like Hemingway, attributing the break to Stein’s literary jealousy:<i> </i>“It never occurred to me until many years later that anyone could hate anyone because they had learned to write conversation from that novel that started off with the quotation from the garage keeper”—that is, the famous statement, “You are all a lost generation” that Hemingway used as an epigraph for <i>The Sun Also Rises.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The new version adds a few other occasional sentences, including two moments of jarring prolepsis: Pauline suddenly appears at the races in “The End of an Avocation” (a chapter primarily featuring Hadley), and Hemingway later remarks that Hadley remarried “and is happy and deserves it.” But the main alteration to the original is sequencing: a few chapters are switched around at the beginning, some long passages are shifted from one chapter to another, and the three famous sketches of F. Scott Fitzgerald are moved to the end of the Paris sketches. This means that the book “proper” doesn’t conclude with the deservedly famous closure of “this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy,” but with Hemingway’s jealous and petty erasure of Fitzgerald at the end of “A Matter of Measurements,” which concludes with the bartender at the Paris Ritz knowing Hemingway well but never having heard of Fitzgerald.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Only in the last 50 pages do we get substantially new material (with the exception of “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” the story of the breakdown of Hemingway and Hadley’s marriage, which has been moved here). This final section is, by any standard, less successful artistically, although it is of biographical interest. It also demonstrates a fair amount about Hemingway’s writing processes—and despair—toward the end. What it doesn’t demonstrate is any great shift in attitude to Pauline, which was supposed to be the volume’s <i>raison d’être.</i> In fact, it includes many draft passages calling Hadley the “heroine” of the book, and Pauline “relentless” in her pursuit of the married Hemingway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Some of the new sketches are amusing, but pure fiction masquerading as fact, as in “The Education of Mr. Bumby,” an undated anecdote purporting to relate the disapproval Hemingway’s young son, Bumby, felt for Fitzgerald’s inability to hold his drink: “A man should first learn to control himself,” Bumby states. “I thought I could make an example.” This is all very amusing: but Bumby was born in October, 1923 and the Hemingways divorced in January, 1927, Hadley taking custody of their son. Hemingway's friendship with Fitzgerald deteriorated after 1926, and he saw his son intermittently after the divorce; if this episode is supposed to have taken place during his marriage to Hadley than Bumby was no older than three, which makes it a trifle implausible, to say the least. Other sketches are less amusing, if probably more accurate: one is called “On Writing in the First Person,” but written in the second person; “Secret Pleasures” anticipates the posthumously published <i>Garden of Eden </i>with its hair fetish, secret language, and erotic pleasure in twinning—and its mawkish self-indulgence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the final “Fragments,” which offers a series of draft efforts at explaining what the memoir is about, Hemingway explains: “This is about the first part of Paris …that we knew and loved and worked in. That Paris you could never put into a single book and I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.” Judged by these new inclusions, the material originally omitted was not excellent. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reading, or that this isn’t a valuable book for “aficionados” of Hemingway. Seán believes this edition offers a “truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.” But does it? In 1960, Hemingway asked his friend A.E. Hotchner to deliver a manuscript of <i>Feast </i>to Scribner’s; both Hotchner and Scribner’s have angrily denounced the restored edition, insisting that the original is the draft Hemingway delivered. What they neglected to mention is that three months before he died, Hemingway wrote to Scribner saying that the manuscript as it stood was unfair to both of his first two wives, and to Fitzgerald. The letter declares that the manuscript "is not to be published the way it is and it has no end". But Hemingway also added in this letter that he felt unable to fix it, as everything he had done since, he contended, made the book even worse. And it is those "worse" drafts that Seán has included and published as the "restored" <i>A Moveable Feast</i>. In the end, the only way in which this is a “truer” <i>Feast </i>is that it has no end. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: small;"><o:p> </o:p></span><!--EndFragment--><span style="font-size: small;">
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Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-6054917780738748842010-06-08T06:52:00.000+01:002010-06-08T06:56:28.403+01:00Review of JD Salinger: A Life Raised High, by Kenneth Slawenski <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link style="font-family: times new roman;" rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Lucida Bright"; panose-1:2 4 6 2 5 5 5 2 3 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:595.0pt 842.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">First published in The New Statesman, 24 April 2010, in abbreviated form, here is the uncut review:</span>
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The one thing virtually everyone knows about J. D. Salinger is that his reclusiveness was both combative and controlling, and he absolutely didn’t want anyone else to write about him. It is, perhaps, a worrying sign when a biographer’s failure to respect his subject’s most fundamental wish creates no discernible cognitive dissonance. In this, the first—but not, one presumes, the last—biography to be published since Salinger’s death earlier this year, Kenneth Slawenski has produced an earnest, well-meaning account which is accurate as far as it goes, but doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">A devoted fan, Slawenski maintains a Salinger website and has spent seven years painstakingly putting together this life. Unsurprisingly, as the biography was researched and written while Salinger was still alive, it received the cooperation of neither the author nor his estate. As a result, Salinger’s own words are minimal and there are no photographs at all; even the jacket cover is a penciled imitation of Salinger’s famous author photograph from the 1950s, a middling likeness at best. And unfortunately, this is one book that can be judged by its cover. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Slawenski has assembled a fair amount of data into a coherent narrative. He is especially successful at marshalling information about Salinger’s service in the Second World War, and his relationship with <i style="">The New Yorker.</i><span style=""> </span>But information is not the same thing as wisdom, and the facts of Salinger’s life before he became a recluse in the early to mid 1960s are better known than some might think: born into an upwardly mobile Jewish family in New York City, on New Year’s Day 1919; sent to Valley Forge school in Pennsylvania, which would later be immortalized as Pencey Prep in <i style="">The Catcher in the Rye; </i>the early ambitions to write, before serving overseas in the Second World War. Slawenski is at his best narrating Salinger’s combat experience, but even there his imagination often fails. For example, Salinger was clearly traumatized by the war: he served at D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge; he was there when Dachau and its satellite camps were liberated. (In a touching detail, Slawenski notes that Salinger carried early drafts of <i style="">Catcher in the Rye</i> with him throughout the war.) He suggests (like Ian Hamilton before him) that Salinger suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome: on V-E Day Salinger “spent the day alone, sitting on his bed, staring at a .45 pistol clutched in his hands. What would it feel like, he wondered, were he to fire the gun through his left palm. … The scene is a macabre one,” Slawenski concludes lamely, “and speaks powerfully of Salinger’s feelings of estrangement and imbalance after the war.” Quite.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The psychological effects of combat may be elusive, but Slawenski is also baffled by Salinger’s relationship to his work. Although he repeats that the young Salinger was always “ambitious,”<span style=""> </span>he thinks that “Salinger’s tendency to ridicule his own works is something of a mystery.” Actually, it was de rigeur for any writer of Salinger’s generation with serious literary aspirations to disparage work sold to the commercial “slick” magazines (Salinger’s idol Fitzgerald did it routinely). He finds it equally “mysterious” that Salinger ever sold a story to Hollywood—before concluding that the “there can be only one explanation … his ambition had imbedded itself so deeply as to become a reflex.” How is reflexive, embedded ambition different from the ordinary kind? There is, actually, another explanation: perhaps Salinger wanted to make some money—and disavowed this desire, after earning enough that he could afford to. Salinger’s intense need for absolute control over his work did not only have artistic consequences, in other words: it had financial ones, too.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Readers who are curious about Salinger’s life can learn some salient facts from this book<i style="">. </i>But readers who are curious about Salinger’s writing should read it, rather than Slawenski’s numbingly reverential paraphrases. He greatly overstates Salinger’s genius: <i style="">Franny and Zooey </i>is far from “universally regarded as a masterpiece,” and <i style="">The Catcher in the Rye </i>is only “the most completely stream-of-consciousness experience offered by American literature” if we don’t count William Faulkner—or Jack Kerouac, or Henry James.<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">What genius Salinger did possess is inextricable from his tone, which at its best was pitch-perfect. The Salinger who emerges from this book is utterly humorless, but Salinger’s comedy is central to his work—and its popularity. The deservedly classic “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” for example, only transcends sentimentality because it so gracefully blends sardonic irony with a teasing sendup of Esmé’s solemnities. But Slawenski seems tone-deaf: “In writing for Esmé with Love and Squalor” it was necessary for Salinger to reach back into the events of his own past. That this story was written by a veteran who suffered the same traumatic stress as those the narrative addresses gives ‘For Esmé’ a certain moral authority.” Maybe—but moral authority is the least of that story’s virtues. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Any literary biographer who asserts flatly that “the aim of fiction is the re-creation of realism” has a fairly impoverished idea of his subject. Although he acknowledges that it’s a “mistake” to assume that Salinger’s writing is autobiographical, Slawenski also informs us that it’s “inconceivable” that Salinger could have altered the facts in a story he wrote based on an Austrian family he knew; because they die in a concentration camp in the story, they must have died in real life. He then proceeds to treat this speculation as fact—because he finds it inconceivable that a fiction writer might have employed fiction. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">This is not what one might call a “critical biography.” It takes Slawenski 240 pages to admit that Salinger might be a trifle “controlling.” He sees no problem, either in literary or biographical terms, with Salinger’s near-obsessive penchant for saintly children as symbols of prelapsarian purity. Even Salinger’s reclusiveness was, to Slawenski, little more than an unfortunate accident, mostly caused by people pestering him. When Salinger took the writer Ian Hamilton to court, Slawenski mentions that Salinger referred to himself as a young man in the third person (as “the boy”) and comments: “Hamilton’s lawyer considered this method of reference odd.” Doesn’t Slawenski? He tells us of Salinger’s mysticism, but not his dabbling with Scientology, or Christian Science, or the occultism of Edgar Cayce. Once the public record fails him, Slawenski’s account just tails off: Salinger’s last forty years are hastily sketched in a couple of chapters. He shares the heartwarming fact that the reclusive Salinger took his two young children on a long-promised holiday to London, but neglects to mention his daughter’s claim in her memoir that he only did so in order to meet a teenaged girl with whom he’d been corresponding. He makes nothing of the fact that, by Slawenski’s own reckoning, Salinger doesn’t seem to have begun a relationship with any woman over the age of 19 until he was in his 70s—when he married a woman 40 years younger. He makes light of the 53-year-old’s relationship with the 18-year-old Joyce Maynard and never mentions any of the other string of adolescent girls in Peggy Salinger’s account, even to refute it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Slawenski’s analytical inadequacies pale, however, beside his stylistic ones. Verbs become nouns (“the letter rings reminiscent of Whit Burnett and his cajoles for The Catcher in the Rye” and “Salinger’s letters overflowed with recounts of her antics”), nouns become adjectives (“his absence was foreboding”) and verbs are misused throughout: “He swore never again to deal with the slicks, regardless of how much they paid. ‘Let us be broke and obscure,’ he resigned.” And: <span style="">"'His tragedy,' Faulkner derived, 'was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there." And, oh, the metaphors: </span>“In Bavaria, Salinger’s sinews to normalcy were strained to the point of bursting”; “William Faulkner’s appreciation of [<i style="">Catcher</i>] brought full circle an inspiration that he himself had unwittingly catapulted.” If Salinger had read this, his sinews to normalcy would have burst, too. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">In his story “Seymour: An Introduction,” Salinger’s narrator dismisses scholars and biographers as a “peerage of tin ears.” One can only conclude, with disappointment, that <i style="">A Life Raised High</i> would have done little to change Salinger’s mind. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">© 2010 by Sarah Churchwell. All rights reserved.</span></p><!--EndFragment--> Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-70956050290793358902010-06-02T11:49:00.000+01:002010-06-02T15:56:37.780+01:00Happy Birthday, Marilyn - Part 2 <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; 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mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" ><o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" ><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p><span style="font-style: italic;">In honor of Marilyn's birthday, here is a short essay I wrote a few years ago for a small magazine, and have never reprinted. Hope you like it.
<br /></span></o:p></span></span> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:ArialMS; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:ArialMS; mso-fareast-font-family:Times; mso-hansi-font-family:ArialMS; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:85%;" >Why do we call Marilyn Monroe a goddess? She could not perform miracles, she <i style="">was</i> the miracle, a pure embodiment of the American Dream in all its counterfeit splendor. Like Fitzgerald’s vision of Jay Gatsby, she sprang from a Platonic conception of herself—but unlike Gatsby she did not stay faithful to her youthful conception to the end. The problem was that no one wanted her to reinvent herself a second time. It is a truism that Marilyn was desire incarnate, but we misconstrue what those desires were, seeing only our own, instead of the fact that hers are what drive the tale.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:85%;" >That Marilyn Monroe even happened—that the foster child Norma Jeane, so rootless that she had multiple last names, propelled herself from the sublunary obscurity of Van Nuys, California into a nation’s cosmology—is itself a miracle of such ardent wanting, such stubborn determination, such dogged, bloody-minded willfulness that it catapulted her to a level of stardom which has still to be matched, and may never be surpassed. Marilyn distilled, and radiated, America’s most treasured assurances: in the beginning, she soaked them up. She trusted that success would ensure esteem, that it should earn wealth, and that all of these things together would prove her worth. Didn’t she live in the greatest meritocracy on earth? She would put herself in the service of the vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty of Tinseltown and make her dreams come true. She didn’t realize that she wasn’t supposed to dream of more than tinsel.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;font-size:85%;" ><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The great struggle of Marilyn’s life wasn’t really her struggle against drugs, alcohol, depression—it was her struggle for respect. It can’t have been easy, to have been the world’s lightning rod. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">“In a way I’m a very unfortunate woman,” she said near the end. “All this nonsense about being a legend, all this glamour and publicity. Somehow I’m always a disappointment to people.” And has that really changed? Marilyn is venerated—but hardly venerable. Respect is still not part of the Marilyn lexicon.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> By any reasonable standard, Marilyn Monroe was staggeringly successful at her chosen profession. But she has never been given the kind of validation she might reasonably have expected: most people still think of her as rather vast, vulgar, and meretricious herself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">For starters, she was never well paid by contemporary industry standards. Although her films almost single-handedly kept Twentieth Century-Fox afloat in the 1950s (only the Cinemascope process contributed as much), Darryl Zanuck refused to pay her anything like her market value. She made Fox millions; they begrudged her a dressing room. The year Marilyn died, Elizabeth Taylor was earning $1 million for <i style="">Cleopatra</i> and Monroe the $100,000 a film she had wrested out of Fox six years earlier. Having publicly fired her, Fox secretly hired her back with a million-dollar contract just days before she died (how little time she had to savor that long-overdue financial victory). Now of course even Marilyn’s garbage is worth six figures at auction—Polaroid snapshots of her terrier sold for $220,000; her driver’s license for over $100,000—but we pay it to someone she never met. As ever, Marilyn exists only to make other people rich (Hugh Hefner, take a bow).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">But in any event Marilyn repudiated money as such: “I don’t want to make money,” she said. “I just want to be wonderful.” People scoffed, but she meant it literally, and fervently. It was never about the money, only about the value, and validation, that money would represent (in that sense, she was a fine Marxist). The same was true of stardom: Marilyn didn’t mistake signs for wonders. Her stardom was the great feat of her life, but stardom might also once have seemed to prove the measure of her worth. What she wanted most, she said, was to be good at her job. “</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">I didn’t want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act.” Stardom and wealth would be the rewards earned by talent and skill; merit would beget more merits.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> Stardom would <i style="">say</i> something—something good—about her. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Instead, she was mocked by the people whose approval she wanted most. Her marriage to Arthur Miller, which she hoped might establish her substance in the eyes of the world (and perhaps her own), was greeted with the derisive headline <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Egghead Weds Hourglass, </span>thus demonstrating that—unlike guilt—respect does not work by association. Unsurprisingly, she resorted in the end to surrounding herself with a court of sycophants and flatterers who would tell her what she wanted to hear, trapping herself in the double-bind of those who can’t trust opinions they have to pay for.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">We blather on about Marilyn’s need for love, her desperate insecurities, her inadequacies, because talking about her anxieties quiets our own, by making her sound like an anomaly, and reproving her for her shortcomings. But why do we find Marilyn so blameworthy for somehow having failed to acquire self-esteem, as if she misplaced it, or forgot to get in line for it? Where, precisely, was her sense of worth supposed to come from, if not from us? Self-esteem derives from feeling valued by others, and it is precisely that validation we have always, sneeringly, withheld—and then blamed her for lacking it. Offered precious little of it as a child, Marilyn did the sensible, the <i style="">mature</i> thing, as an adult—she tried to learn how to acquire self-confidence in the realms she could control. She tried to change her own mind, hoping that this might change the minds of others about her: in her own words, she sought to build a foundation in her work: “</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">My work is the only ground I've ever had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I'm working on the foundation.” But no one wanted a grounded Marilyn: they wanted her floating above Time Square. They wanted tinsel. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">Marilyn was a casualty of the Puritan work ethic: she worked extraordinarily hard; she succeeded, immeasurably; and yet we continue smugly to insist that she failed in all the things that matter. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Marilyn’s need to be loved was no different from that of everyone else in kind; perhaps it was greater in degree—but perhaps not. The same can be said of her insecurities, her anxieties: they were powerful, and she was not particularly good at ignoring them, but she certainly fought them. Her lack of confidence, her stage fright, her diffidence about her lack of education: she battled against them all, determined to show herself, and everyone else, that she was worthwhile. “I finally made up my mind I wanted to be an actress and I was not going to let my lack of confidence ruin my chances,” she said. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">“My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!” She tried to change, but we didn’t let her—because then we’d have to change our minds, and admit she was one of America’s greatest success stories instead of our favorite tragic myth.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the fault lies not in our star, but in ourselves?</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The rapture with which she was greeted frequently betrayed a nasty edge: for everyone who called her a goddess there was someone else to call her a monster or “freak”—a beautiful freak, or freak of nature (they loved variations on that one). The implications are clear, and wouldn’t have been lost on her: </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">her success was a grotesque accident, which she certainly didn’t earn; she was just an “arrogant little tail-twitcher who learned to throw sex in your face.” </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">When Marilyn left Joe DiMaggio, she was handed a letter with the word “whore” written in shit. Even her own biographers tend to agree, and her freakishness and whorishness become fixed: they call her schizoid, paranoid, frigid, nymphomaniac, unformed, immature, embryonic, prostitute and madwoman.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> Every name in the book.</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">And the tributes? </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">Take </span><i style=""><span style="line-height: 150%;">The Misfits</span></i><span style="line-height: 150%;">, Miller’s “valentine” to Marilyn, which imagines her as a tree-hugging hysteric (“he could have written me anything and he comes up with this,” she commented).<span style=""> </span>Billy Wilder said she was a genius—the first time she was photographed; cinematographer Jack Cardiff that she wasn’t an actress, she was a genius. Her passivity is enshrined: how could she take credit, take solace, gain affirmation from compliments that credited anything and everything other than herself with her own success? The people made her a star; the studio made her a star; God made her a star; her body made her a star; nature made her a star. All this to describe someone so self-propelled she was more of a comet, who took her ambitions, her career, and her life seriously, and wanted only to be treated seriously in return.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">“Some people have been unkind,” she remarked once, revealing a great talent for understatement: “</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.” In the beginning, they laughed at Marilyn because she couldn’t act; so (not unreasonably) she took acting lessons. Then they laughed at her pretension, her presumption. How dare she aspire to better herself! Who does she think she is, an American?</span><span style="line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 36pt; line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Near the end of her life, Monroe commented upon how she survived the difficult filming of <i style="">The Misfits</i>: “I had to use my wits, or else I’d have been sunk—and nothing’s going to sink me.” If only she could have convinced us. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;">In 1953, she told <i style="">The New York Times:</i> “My dramatic coach, Natasha Lytess, tells everybody that I have a great soul—but so far nobody’s interested in it. Someday, though, someday—” <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">In the meantime, she kept chasing the promise of the green light: it receded before her, it eluded her, but no matter, she would run faster, try harder, and, “someday,” tomorrow … Aspirationalism in its purest form, that’s Marilyn Monroe—a greater Gatsby. </span></p><p class="MsoBodyTextIndent" face="times new roman" style="line-height: 150%;"> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:ArialMS; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:ArialMS; mso-fareast-font-family:Times; mso-hansi-font-family:ArialMS; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader {mso-style-link:"Header Char"; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 216.0pt right 432.0pt; font-size:13.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:ArialMS; mso-fareast-font-family:Times; mso-hansi-font-family:ArialMS; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} span.HeaderChar {mso-style-name:"Header Char"; mso-style-locked:yes; mso-style-link:Header; mso-ansi-font-size:13.0pt; font-family:ArialMS; mso-ascii-font-family:ArialMS; mso-hansi-font-family:ArialMS;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> </p><p class="MsoHeader" style="text-align: right;" align="right"><span style="font-size:85%;">© 2006 by Sarah Churchwell. All rights reserved.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p></p><p class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 150%; font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-80174311471411287282010-06-02T08:07:00.000+01:002010-06-02T11:05:25.278+01:00Happy Birthday MarilynYesterday - June 1st, 2010 - would have been Marilyn Monroe's 84th birthday. It is hard to believe that it has been six years (yipes) since my book about her (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) first came out.<br /><br />I've been lucky enough to spend the last couple of days going through early proofs of Farrar Straus Giroux's upcoming Marilyn: Fragments. (They wouldn't appreciate my giving anything away, so don't look for any spoilers here.)<br /><br />The book comes from Marilyn's notes and papers, which were left to Lee Strasberg, her friend and acting teacher, when she died in August, 1962. Her will asked him to distribute her effects among her friends; because of legal wrangling (and perhaps some other reasons), that didn't happen. His wife Paula died; he remarried a woman called Anna, whom Marilyn never met; Anna Strasberg now controls Marilyn's estate, after Lee's death in 1982, and it is through her auspices that this publication has come about.<br /><br />Marilyn: Fragments is due for publication in October; I will have more to say about it then. But I will say this: many books (<span style="font-style: italic;">many</span> books) have purported to be "in her own words" since she died. This claim has been everything from highly arguable (such as her ghost-written "autobiography," <span style="font-style: italic;">My Story</span>, which was co-authored by at least two writers, and probably ghost-revised after her death; it was certainly ghost-edited after her death) to the outright nonsensical (everything else). This book actually <span style="font-style: italic;">is </span>Marilyn's own words--it reproduces notebook pages, in her handwriting, and then transcribes them. That alone makes it worth reading.<br /><br />It was quite something to spend her birthday reading it. Happy Birthday, Marilyn.Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-26777937343684105562010-05-31T12:14:00.000+01:002010-06-02T11:18:51.983+01:00Sex and the City, Liz Jones, and Me, Blondie<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Well that was fun. I've now been personally attacked by Liz Jones for a little VT I made for the BBC on romantic comedy, linked to Sex and the City 2. (I'm not linking to her piece in the Daily Mail because I don't want to be sullied by it. You can google if you want to find it.)
<br />
<br />Here's what Liz has to say about my little film:
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"</span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">The final straw in the whole PC backlash was when a snooty blonde American academic pontificated on BBC2’s Newsnight Review that the romantic comedy is dead, and why on earth do we no longer (yawn) have strong female role models? </span><p><span style="font-style: italic;">Listen, blondie, you obviously didn’t spend enough time as a child in front of the telly. Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday was about to throw in the typewriter and get married, and indeed ends up happily ever after with Cary Grant (a plot followed as closely by SATC the TV series as Bridget Jones mirrored Pride and Prejudice). </span>
<br /></p><div class="clear"> </div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="thinCenter"><p class="imageCaption">Sex And The City 2 deals with the issue of being married to a monosyllabic nightmare who only ever wants to watch TV, with the menopause, with the mundanity of motherhood</p></div> <p style="font-style: italic;">Blondie cited The Philadelphia Story, as if this were some homage to women’s lib.</p><p style="font-style: italic;">Can I remind you that Kate Hepburn, an unemployed heiress, gets smacked in the mouth by Cary Grant, apologises to her father for being a shrew, promises to behave, and gratefully marries the aforementioned wife beater and recovering alcoholic in the closing credits. </p><p>Hi there, I'm the Blondie. *waves*
<br /></p><p>I'll leave the incoherence of Liz's piece behind, and simply point out a few of the most egregiously stupid of the things she says about me.</p><p>First, it is a two-minute VT, produced and edited by the BBC. Liz obviously hasn't made very many films, or she would know that I had very limited control over what was done in that film: only the words I speak are definitely mine.</p><p>For the record, I say nothing in the film about The Philadelphia Story. If there were images used from the film (I haven't watched it yet, as I hate watching myself on tv), that was not my idea. In fact, The Philadelphia Story is a Taming of the Shrew tale, as I have written elsewhere, so it is not a feminist exemplum. Actually Katharine (not "Kate," Liz, you never met her, but perhaps you don't know how to spell Katharine?) Hepburn is supposed to have told playwright Philip Barry to make the heroine "like me, but make her go all soft at the end."
<br /></p><p>I only mention "Katharine Hepburn" in the piece. Liz seems to be under the impression that The Philadelphia Story is the only film she made. There were others, Liz - more than 50, in fact.
<br /></p><p>Second, in calling me "Blondie," Liz seems to believe that knowledge is correlated with hair color. The idea that my hair-color symbolizes anything about me, or what I know, is just the kind of stupid thinking you'd expect from a brunette. Grow up, Liz, and get off the playground. The same goes for my being "snooty" and - gasp - an academic. Name-calling is a terrific substitute for an actual argument, and prejudice and presumption is much easier than thinking.
<br /></p><p>Actually, Liz, I know more about screwball comedy (that's what they're called) in one blonde hair follicle than you will ever know. My family would be convulsed with hysterics at the idea that I didn't spend enough teen years in front of the tv: I never left it, and I watched nothing but old black and white films for years. I have written about them, read about them, and watched them, all of them (and I mean all of them) for decades. I own, and love, screwball comedies that I can assure you, Liz, you've never heard of.
<br /></p><p>As for His Girl Friday, as I wrote in the comment to Liz's column, I made the connection between this film and Sex and the City three years ago, in the Spectator. Perhaps Liz got the idea for the comparison by reading my 2007 column? It's here. <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/51755/sex-and-the-city-has-nothing-on-screwball-comedy.thtml">http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/51755/sex-and-the-city-has-nothing-on-screwball-comedy.thtml</a></p><p>The idea that His Girl Friday is the ur-plot of Sex and the City is, frankly, moronic. His Girl Friday is based on a play (The Front Page) that was about two men, an editor and his star reporter; in 1940 director Howard Hawks had the brilliant idea to make the reporter a woman, and a classic was born. But Walter Burns, the Cary Grant character, is a bastard - he's charming, and gorgeous and fabulous in every way except that he has no morals and treats Hildy (Rosalind Russell) like shit. Deciding that this Cary Grant character - a cheater, liar, thief, manipulator - is infinitely preferable to the Cary Grant character in The Philadelphia Story seems, let's say, rather an arbitrary choice.</p><p>I adore His Girl Friday in every way, but let's tell the truth about it. It has no connection to SATC except that Carrie is supposedly a "journalist"--but a tough investigative newspaper reporter she ain't. There are no other parallels whatsoever, beyond the so general as to be meaningless. Those are probably the ones Liz was thinking of.
<br /></p><p>But the most amazing part is that Liz assumes I haven't seen this specific film because it wasn't mentioned in a 2-minute tv film. By that logic, I also haven't seen, or heard of anything in this list either, which I just happen to have on file despite my startling ignorance of the genre (the asterisks indicate films I especially recommend):
<br /></p><p> <meta name="Title" content="Test "Title""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <title>Test "Title"</title> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times CE"; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:88; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:5 0 0 0 2 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, 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</style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> </p><ol style="margin-top: 0cm; font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" start="1" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">It Happened One Night </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1934)**<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Twentieth Century </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1934)<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Thin Man </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1934)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Gay Divorcee </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1934)<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Richest Girl in the World </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1934)<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Hands Across the Table </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1935)<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Red Salute </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1935)<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">If You Could Only Cook </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1935)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Remember Last Night? </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1935)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">She Married Her Boss </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1935)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Mr. Deeds Goes to Town </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">My Man Godfrey </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Awful Truth </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)**<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Nothing Sacred </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">**</i><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Bride Walks Out (</span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >1936<i style="">),<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Ex-Mrs Bradford </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">,</i> <o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Princess Comes Across </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Love on the Run </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Moon’s Our Home </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Theodora Goes Wild </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">*<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Wedding Present </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Breakfast for Two </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Double Wedding </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Easy Living </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">**<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">History is Made At Night </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style=""> *<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">I Met Him In Paris </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">It’s Love I’m After </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Libeled Lady </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style="">*<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Love Before Breakfast </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1936)<i style=""> <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Love is News </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Second Honeymoon </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Topper </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">True Confession </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1937)<i style="">*<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Bringing Up Baby </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938)<i style="">** <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Bachelor Mother </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1939)<i style="">**<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Holiday </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938)<i style="">**<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Midnight </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1939)<i style="">**</i><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Mad Miss Manton </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Having Wonderful Time </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Joy of Living </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Merrily We Live </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938), <o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Vivacious Lady </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1938),<i style=""> <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">5th Ave Girl </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1939)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Café Society </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1939)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Eternally Yours </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1939)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">It’s A Wonderful World </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1939)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">His Girl Friday </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)**<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Ball of Fire </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)**<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Devil and Miss Jones </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)*<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Sullivan’s Travels </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)**<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Lady Eve </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Palm Beach Story </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1942)<i style="">**</i><o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Philadelphia Story </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">*<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">My Favorite Wife </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">*<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Too Many Husbands </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Turnabout </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Hired Wife </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">I Love You Again </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">No Time for Comedy </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Public Deb. No 1 </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<i style="">, <o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">He Stayed for Breakfast </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1940)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Love Crazy </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)<i style="">,<o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Mr.and Mrs Smith </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">The Bride Came C.O.D. </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1941)<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">To Be or Not to Be </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1942)*<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="" lang="CS">Once Upon a Honeymoon </span></i></span><span style=";font-size:85%;" lang="CS" >(1942)</span></li></ol><span style=";font-family:";" lang="CS"></span><p></p><p><span style=";font-family:";" lang="CS">I end the list there for various reasons I won't enumerate now, and which Liz wouldn't understand anyway. Anyone else reading this, do yourself a favor and if you haven't seen these films, get a hold of them and enjoy. I'll be laughing with you in spirit.
<br /></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:";" lang="CS">I've also written about screwball and the great women who starred in them here: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/jun/12/fashion.women">http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/jun/12/fashion.women</a> and here <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/06/comedy.celebrity">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/06/comedy.celebrity</a> and here <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/may/14/film.comment">http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/may/14/film.comment</a>
<br /></span></p><p><span style=";font-family:";" lang="CS">So Liz, there you have it. You were talking out of your ass, as usual. And I'm quite sure that neither Katharine Hepburn, nor Rosalind Russell, would want me to take this crap lying down.
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<br /></div>Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-67621104939213170662010-05-31T12:08:00.000+01:002010-05-31T12:10:17.857+01:00Wizard of Oz<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Here is a piece I wrote for the Guardian on the Wizard of Oz, before it was cut for space (22 May 2010).
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<br /></span> <meta name="Title" content="Test "Title""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <title>Test "Title"</title> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0cm; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:595.0pt 842.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">As Britain prepares breathlessly for Sunday’s finale of <i style="">Over the Rainbow</i>, Drew Barrymore announced plans to direct <i style="">Surrender Dorothy,</i> the story of Dorothy’s great-great-granddaughter, who apparently uses the ruby slippers to defeat the Wicked Witch of the West (the reports are unclear about whether she’s been resurrected, or it’s her great-great-granddaughter, too) in her attempts to conquer Oz and Earth. The Wicked Witch used to just enslave Munchkins and monkeys; now she’s a rather more ambitious imperialist.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Meanwhile, Robert Downey, Jr. is rumored to be making a Disney prequel explaining how the wizard ended up in Oz, at least two CGI productions have been proposed, and something called <i style="">The Witches of Oz, </i>which will star Christopher Lloyd as the wizard.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Oz is clearly enjoying a renaissance. In part, as some have already noted, these are predictable efforts to capitalize on the recent success of new versions of old classic fantasies, from Tim Burton’s <i style="">Alice in Wonderland </i>to <i style="">Lord of the Rings. </i>But there is something particularly appropriate to <i style="">The Wizard of Oz </i>returning to our screens, both large and small, and to the West End, right now.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">L. Frank Baum’s <i style="">The Wizard of Oz </i>was published in 1900, as America emerged from a recession in the 1890s. Its most famous film version appeared in 1939, as America tried to decide whether it was emerging from the Great Depression, and whether to enter the war in Europe, or continue to avoid it. It has become a truism that the films of the Great Depression offered escapism, but this facile observation doesn’t begin to explain the power these films still possess to comfort even modern audiences.<span style=""> </span>Like all the greatest Hollywood films of the 1930s, <i style="">The Wizard of Oz </i>offers a master class in consoling philosophies, the art of running away from your troubles—and what will happen when you return.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Dorothy seeks a life over the rainbow, her own fantasy of avoidance, of running away from the grey life of agrarian survival in the Kansas dustbowl.<span style=""> </span>But when she dreams of crash-landing among beings with magical powers (including a great deal of symbolic flight), she drags her home along with her and drops it on a witch. Home was never so comforting: it doesn’t just save Dorothy, it liberates all the enslaved munchkins. For the rest of the film, Dorothy tries to get home, but Dorothy is exactly like her friends, who already have the brains, heart, and nerve they seek—she never left home at all: she brought it with her. So when she “learns” that there’s no place like home, the implication is not that she’s lowering her standards and resigning herself to her lot in life, but that you can, in fact, go home again. As the “Optimistic Voices” (so-named by the screenplay) sing: “You’re out of the woods, you’re out of the dark, you’re out of the night”…</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Films like <i style="">The Wizard of Oz </i>(and <i style="">Gone with the Wind, </i>which came out in the same year) were immense hits with an American audience that had been grappling for the best part of a decade with rampant homelessness and despair because they offered myths of survival and return. <span style="">By contrast, many of our most popular contemporary stories focus on leaving home: fantasy sagas like Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars cycle, or Pirates of the Caribbean are initiation stories about young men learning to be heroes, stories of journey, adventure, quests, and king-making. Such imperial fantasies are quite at odds with the very domestic stories of the Depression. In times of comfort, stories of leaving home are signs of independence and power; in seasons of want, stories of leaving home are signs of desperation.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">No surprise, then, that our own grandiose age of peddling endless ambition should shift the focus either to fantasies of saving the world, or to the wizard, the man behind the curtain—who’s now the man perched on a golden throne every Sunday night deciding the fate of Dorothy.<span style=""> </span>The pragmatic opportunism of Professor Marvell, who grabs his power where he can, was part of the problem in the original story. The wizard is just a humbug; how typical that we should turn him into a hero, or pop him onto a throne. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->
<br />Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-72013379379937779282010-05-31T11:54:00.000+01:002010-05-31T11:56:42.210+01:00Sarah B for Blog<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Welcome to my belated blog, which will be used primarily to publish my journalism, both so it is one place authored by me, and also to give me the chance to publish full versions when pieces are cut for space, which happens more and more as our dying papers give less and less space to cultural and arts criticism.<br /><br />I hope you enjoy reading it. Comments are of course welcome, as long as they are courteous.<br /></span>Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5146499526368154491.post-45229383938544674222010-05-31T11:47:00.000+01:002010-05-31T11:59:05.395+01:00Review of Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel <meta name="Title" content="Test "Title""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link style="font-family: times new roman;" rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <title>Test "Title"</title> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Baskerville; panose-1:2 2 5 2 7 4 1 2 3 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3"; mso-font-alt:"ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 0 16778247 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Geeza Pro"; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.Body1, li.Body1, div.Body1 {mso-style-name:"Body 1"; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family:"ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3"; mso-hansi-font-family:Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; color:black;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt 72.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:43.2pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman" style="text-align: justify;">Here is the full review, before it was cut for space by the Observer (30 May 2010)
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Historians and scholars have long debated the relationship of art to the Holocaust, a debate referred to in shorthand as “the limits of representation,” which asks: does the sheer scale of the Holocaust mean that any attempt always risks trivializing or oversimplifying it, reducing the horror to a story that can be read, put away and forgotten? Can the Holocaust adequately be represented? Henry, the protagonist of Yann Martel’s <i style="">Beatrice and Virgil, </i>the follow-up to his prize-winning 2002 <i style="">The Life of Pi, </i>is a writer who decides to challenge the fact that no “poetic license was taken with—or given to—the Holocaust,” and represent its evil and suffering in a new way.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Henry bears a striking resemblance to his author: like Martel, Henry’s second novel, a charming, poignant tale of the humanity of animals, was an unexpected success, bringing prizes and fame. For five years Henry has labored on his next project, a “flip book” that combines Holocaust novel with Holocaust essay, representing the catastrophe in, he fondly believes, an original way. Henry’s publishers deem the book itself catastrophic, and Henry staggers off into writer’s block and self-pity. He and his wife, Sarah, move to some interchangeable cosmopolitan city--“Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin”—where Henry amuses himself by waiting tables at a fair trade café, playing the clarinet and acting in amateur theatricals. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">One day Henry receives a package in the mail, with a letter and Flaubert’s story “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,” a fable about a boy whose greatest pleasure is killing animals. If you don’t know Flaubert’s story, never fear: Martel devotes 15 pages to summarizing and quoting long passages of it. He also explains that “hospitator” means, basically, host; at book’s end we learn that Henry’s surname is L’Hôte. The package also includes part of a play about two characters named Beatrice and Virgil, standing in a road, by a tree, trading cryptic epigrams. The first excerpt consists of their efforts to describe a pear; later they debate what to do next (“We should go, then? / We should”) and offer sophomoric philosophizing about something they call the Horrors: “How can there be anything beautiful after what we’ve lived through? It’s incomprehensible.” Not nearly as incomprehensible as the clumsiness of this from a writer capable of Martel’s grace.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">The letter writer just happens to live in the same city as Henry (though no one knows that Henry moved there). A taxidermist, he also just happens to be named Henry. (Flaubert and Beckett, meet Mr Dostoevsky.) Beatrice, in fact, is a stuffed donkey, Virgil a stuffed monkey on her back (see what he did there?); they are the taxidermist’s “guide to hell.” Martel thoughtfully helps out readers struggling with all this literary virtuosity: “Hell? What hell? Henry wondered. But at least now he understood the connection to <i style="">The Divine Comedy. </i>Dante is guided through inferno and purgatory by Virgil and then through paradise by Beatrice.” <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Like the reader who needs help understanding Martel’s allusions, Henry the taxidermist needs help writing his play, <i style="">A 20<sup>th</sup>-Century Shirt </i>(Beatrice and Virgil are living on a striped shirt. Don’t ask) and writer Henry inexplicably agrees to assist. The result is a book by turns pretentious, humorless, tedious, and obvious. All of the characters are there to be manipulated: Henry is endlessly blind to the evident, while all the other characters are cardboard cutouts propped around the novel: his wife, Sarah, might better have been named Henry’s Pregnant Wife, as she is otherwise a gesture. Even less credible is the sinister taxidermist Henry, who is meant to be menacing but whose only real threat comes from the possibility that he might bore the reader to death. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Taxidermist Henry reads ersatz-Beckett out loud for pages at a time, or pontificates on the fate of animals and the ethics of taxidermy; otherwise he is a cipher until the end, when he suddenly provides the novel some much-needed but quite unbelievable action. Host Henry delivers wooden, overwritten speeches ("I noticed that a donkey has an appealing terrestrial solidity--it's a good, solid animal--yet its limbs are surprisingly slim. It's as firm yet lithely connected to the earth as a birch tree”) and explains Martel’s allusions to the reader. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">Attempting to manage the problems he has created in trying to mix allegory, psychology, metafiction, mystery and a parable about the Holocaust (not to mention our inhumanity to animals) in under 200 pages, Martel also makes Henry explain the book’s flaws: “There seemed to be essentially no action and no plot in it. Just two characters by a tree talking. It had worked with Beckett and Diderot. Mind you, those two were crafty and they packed a lot of action into the apparent inaction. But inaction wasn’t working for the author of <i style="">A 20<sup>th</sup>-Century Shirt.</i>” No kidding.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p> <meta name="Title" content="Test "Title""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link style="font-family: times new roman;" rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/SarahB/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <title>Test "Title"</title> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Baskerville; panose-1:2 2 5 2 7 4 1 2 3 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">“About what happens in the play,” Henry tells Henry, “in effect what happens is they talk about talk.” This means that in effect what happens in the novel is they talk about a play in which what happens is they talk about talk, and they talk about silence, and they talk about horror, and they talk about the unrepresentable. Then a few bad things happens from which we are entirely insulated by all of the talk, all of the silence, all of the abstraction, and the fact that this is a taxidermist we don’t like narrating a play about a stuffed monkey and donkey to a protagonist whose total solipsism insulates us even further from caring about any of it.<o:p></o:p></p> <o:p style="font-family: times new roman;"></o:p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;">At the end, author Henry develops some “games,” twelve brief questions posing to the reader the kind of moral quandaries William Styron so successfully dramatized in <i style="">Sophie’s Choice:</i> would you allow your son to endanger his life to try to save the rest of the family? If you knew people were about to be killed and you couldn’t stop it, would you warn them? If only Martel had bothered to dramatize any of these dilemmas, and think through the answers rather than abdicating responsibility to the reader, he might have produced a novel that didn’t show the limits of representation quite so painfully.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-family: times new roman;"><i style=""><span style="color:black;">© Copyright 2010 Sarah Churchwell. Do not reproduce without prior written permission.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p> <p class="Body1" style="text-align: justify;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="color:#000000;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> Sarah Churchwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12541387102200168148noreply@blogger.com0