Towards the Green Light

The exquisite Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan

The Great Gatsby (Australia/U.S., 2013) directed by Baz Luhrmann, 143 minutes 
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald (Originally published 1922)

The Great Gatsby has proven a formidable book to try and represent on film … and woe to those who have tried and failed as the critics' knives will be out forthwith. Announcements that Baz Luhrmann, considered a cinematic showman and, some might say, an impresario of excess, was to tackle the book met with both frenzied excitement and derision. If you loved Luhrmann's William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) you were optimistic and giddy in anticipation. If you hated those films (and Luhrmann haters are legion) you were dismayed at the idea of Luhrmann tackling one of the best loved American classics of all times.

I had a chance to see the film last weekend with three friends. We possessed varying levels of enthusiasm about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby - from wildly impassioned devotee (me) to largely indifferent long ago readers of the book. I re-read the book every summer and plan to do so again this summer while in NYC.

As I watched the credits roll I had mixed feelings … I felt that certain characters had been miscast.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby), a talented and versatile actor, is, unfortunately, too old for the part. DiCaprio, now in his late 30s, is meant to represent a young man newly released from the army a mere four years before in 1918 (although there were mature soldiers in the war, Gatsby was not one of those). DiCaprio is too intense, too arrogant, too jaunty a persona, for the role. The accent DiCaprio uses is a mystery to me ... I'm not sure if it works as a obvious false construction of what he (Gatsby) believes is what an upper crust person would sound like or it is merely just wrong for the role.

Gatsby, despite his great wealth, is extremely vulnerable and insecure. The sudden amassing of his great wealth through illicit means demonstrates how desperately he wants to prove his worth to Daisy. And extremely naive. Money, that great American idol and symbol of success, is not enough to capture this golden girl. As Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, so brutally points out, Gatsby lacks the unattainable prestige of inherited wealth and status ("We were born different. It's in our blood"), symbolized, for Gatsby, by the green light at the end of the Buchanans' dock on which he is fixated as he languishes in his Long Island mansion.

Oheka Castle ... said to be an inspiration for Gatsby's mansion

Carey Mulligan, lovely and vulnerable as the southern belle Daisy, sometimes has an accent as fleeting and ephemeral as the beautiful vintage dresses she wears in the film. And there is very little chemistry between the two main characters. But Mulligan does display the precise amount of vulnerability and self-absorption that the character warrants.

Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway) has that dumbstruck look that he carries from film to film and that doesn’t quite work here. However, the Australian actor Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband the philandering polo player, is spot on – cruel, ignorant, almost feral, and totally terrifying especially in the final confrontation at the Plaza Hotel where the men almost come to blows over Daisy. Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, is a little too crude, a little too obvious – yes, she’s meant to be a “cheap floozie” but Myrtle has legitimate reasons for feeling trapped, feeling cheated by her life in the flat above the garage and her slovenly husband George Wilson (impressively, if briefly, portrayed by Jason Clarke); however, the script gives no sense of that disappointment. For this I blame the costume/ production designer Catherine Martin and the director.

Certainly the CGI enhanced scenes - of Gatsby’s home on the fictional West Egg, the Buchanans’ lavish estate in East Egg (inspired by the old money locale of Manhasset Neck on Long Island), the orgiastic parties at Gatsby’s mansion, aerial views of the island of Manhattan - are vivid, often beautiful, but sometimes the effects and scenes are overwrought, overwhelming, and clearly unconvincing. 

When Myrtle is struck by Gatsby's car (with Daisy driving) her body flies up into the air surrounded by shattered glass spurting like tiny stars and skims the heights of Dr. Eckleburg's spectacles on the fabled giant, omnipresent billboard - not once, but twice, in the film. 

I felt at times as if Luhrmann did not trust the source material and that he felt he had to heighten the comedy or drama of certain scenes ... no need to make the attendees at the little impromptu party at Myrtle and Tom's hideaway on 158th Street more ridiculous, or sad, than they already are. The characters are sad and seedy but the designer clothes them in ridiculously bright colours and strange clothing with clown like makeup for the women (Myrtle, her sister Catherine and a neighbour named Mrs. McKee) and absurd little physical quirks for the lone man (Mr. McKee, an aspiring, foppish photographer). Or take the organist Klipspringer's character, who is depicted as a sort of mad, bizarre looking musical genius rather than an intriguing secondary character who haunts Gatsby's mansion and parties. 

The filmed scenes of the parties are riotous and frenzied ... was every party goer compelled to behave like a frat boy at his first party with alcohol? The action is too frenetic, too forced. Every inch of the screen is crammed with undulating, squirming partyers. Again, Luhrmann doesn't trust us to understand the excesses of the age as depicted by Fitzgerald on the page.

Of course, despite the predominance of black musicians and singers on the soundtrack black Americans play virtually no role in the book except as a source of bemusement or suspicion (when Nick passes a trio of haughty blacks in an expensive car he is condescendingly amused at their supposed sense of superiority) or in Tom Buchanan’s tirade to Nick, Daisy and Jordan Baker, Nick's erstwhile love interest, about having to beat back the coloured hordes or face the demise of white civilization. 

But in the film, as if to atone for this deficit and Luhrmann's heavy reliance on the talent of black artists on the excellent soundtrack, the black characters are essentially very pretty, shiny ornaments in the background - the entertainers and dancers at Gatsby’s parties and at a speakeasy that Gatsby takes Nick to with the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim – dressed in sumptuous, revealing costumes or as smartly dressed but indistinctly defined musicians who dutifully entertain the masses of white revelers. This is accentuated by their perfect, flawless skin and fully toned bodies.

The most annoying new element in the script is Nick's commitment to a sanatorium after Gatsby's death (this is how the film starts). This permits the filmmaker to tell Gatsby's life story as Nick writes it down for his doctor. This is a vast deviation from Carraway's character - he is not a broken man but an immensely disillusioned one, who has seen too much and been sickened by what he has seen in the destruction of Gatsby's life. One advantage of this technique is it allows the filmmaker to print Fitzgerald's words on the screen as Carraway writes them ... this highlights the more beautiful passages of the book.

I missed the exclusion of small sections from the book that were omitted - Meyer Wolfsheim's pathetic refusal to come to Gatsby's funeral, Gatsby's barely literate father Mr. Gatz coming for his remains and revealing some sad memories of the young Gatsby's aspirations, and, Nick's confrontation with an unrepentant Tom Buchanan on the streets of NYC long after Gatsby is dead. And Luhrmann doesn't even dare touch on the blatant anti-Semitism in the book regarding the Wolfsheim character (loosely based on the notorious gangster Arnold Rothstein). 

One thing that did remain with me was the music – a melange of hip hop and rap (Jay-Z, Kanye West), romantic moody melodies (Lana Del Rey, Beyonce, Sia, Gotye), and re-orchestrated classics (Brian Ferry). But they strike exactly the right mood despite the anachronistic nature of the 21stc. musical choices made by Luhrmann. You may listen to the soundtrack here ...

But I have to say, the film and its images have stayed with me ... it might be worth another look.  

Two of the best things in the film: Jason Clarke and Joel Edgerton

The Lark Ascending, Hysterically

No More Parades - Book Two of Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford (Originally published 1926) 309 pages

Just as the phrase "Some Do Not" has multiple meanings in the first book (please see a review of the first book here), so does the phrase "No More Parades" in the second book in Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End. No more military fanfare, no more games, no more false glory, nor more illusions, as our hero Christopher Tietjens attempts to absent himself from his wife Sylvia' treachery and Valentine's ardor, which he cannot reciprocate, by returning as an officer to the war in France. 

I admit I struggled with the first two books: the pace seemed off, the characters unsympathetic, the rituals of the aristocrats odd but I kept thinking, and yet, and yet ... there is something here. 

The war occupies much of the second novel and the story is largely set over a few days in Rouen, France in 1917. Tietjens is once again serving in the military as an officer preparing new conscripts for the front line; Sylvia is (temporarily) in a convent nursing her wounds over Tietjens' seeming emotional indifference towards her and Valentine is ministering to her famous novelist mother's needs back in England and teaching as a physical instructor at a girls' school. 

Or is Sylvia in a convent? Tietjens, while dealing with the exigencies of war and other various difficulties (men dying before him, men not returning from leave, men embroiled in disputes with each other), receives a note that Sylvia is nearby in Rouen, waiting to see him. Here the stream of consciousness style that Ford adopts works very effectively (dubbed by Ford as "Impressionism") with Tietjens as he moves swiftly from the more immediate concerns of war to thoughts of the two women. Eros (love) and Thanatos (death) war mightily in his battered consciousness.

Our hero at war ...

Ford has an elliptical narrative style that alludes to an event and then sometimes does not discuss or refer to it for many more pages. Late in the novel, Tietjens must explain the details of Gen. O'Hara and Sylvia's old lover Perowne colliding at Sylvia's hotel room door at 3 a.m. to General Campion in copious detail ... stalling the narrative somewhat and belaboring an important point: Campion no longer trusts Tietjen's judgment and banishes him to the front.

Julian Barnes, who wrote the preface for the newly issued Parade's End and a wonderful article in the Guardian, noted that even though there is very little actual sex in the book, it is thoroughly saturated with thoughts about sex.  

Ford dealt with the sexual antagonism between male and female in a new way, not obliquely, not superficially. Sex is a worrisome business, sexual feeling is tortuous. "It's woman against man," Tietjens laments, "Now and ever has been." Few books posit the antagonism between the sexes so brutally.

Sexual feeling pervades all in the book ...  

The aristocratic society that Tietjens inhabits, due to the machinations of his enemies and of Sylvia's jealousy, has deemed him to be a frightful womanizer, a "rip" as he describes it, based on virtually no evidence at all. Sylvia's actions are reprehensible in Book One and largely off camera but in Book Two she withdraws into a self-imposed celibacy principally, it seems, to wound Tietjens. Tietjens is often obsessed with the sensual physical aspects of the

The alluring Rebecca Hall as Sylvia Tietjens

two women: Valentine's quivering lip and fresh visage; Sylvia's "glorious halo" of hair, her beautiful clothes, even a scene where he witnesses her use a powder puff in intimate areas has the power to move him. A lark* that Tietjens hears in France appears "oversexed" to his ears in its unusually "hysterical" singing. A soldier wants leave to go and deal with a wife suspected of infidelity back home and is blown to bits when he is denied leave and must remain in camp. Another officer wants a leave to divorce his wife but then decides, cannily, that it is easier to share one's wife with her lover. Mark, Christopher's brother, suspects that their father's generous financial support of Mrs. Wannop the novelist (Valentine's mother) is because of some past affair with the older woman or that he fathered her child (it is not). Most seem to have very degraded impression of their fellow human beings. 

I imagine that some of these scenes and the dialogue would be perceived as coarse and vulgar for its time, overly sensual, disturbing.

Graham Greene, another British writer who edited an earlier edition of Parade's End in the late 1940s and greatly admired Ford's handiwork, described Sylvia as evil. Ford does indeed depict her in the novel as a "snake that fixes a bird" but this doesn't quite do justice to Sylvia's personality. It is not until Book Two that we begin to understand, a little, her motivations and feelings towards Tietjens. 

I spoke of  Tietjens' misogyny but it is no match for Sylvia's antipathy towards the male sex and its motivations: '"You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women ..." she derisively proclaims of men.

General Campion, Tietjens' immediate superior (and godfather) warns Tietjens: "For the morality of these matters is this ... If you have an incomparably beautiful woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her." Tietjens fails to do this ... whether he is overly respectful towards her privacy and standing in society or merely vindictive, his actions seem to push Sylvia further into extreme acts of vengeance.

By the novel's end General Campion is so disgusted by the business between the married couple and its effect on the battalion where Tietjens served, that he sends Tietjens back to the front line and what he says will be a certain death. No more parades he admonishes Tietjens. Shall he survive it? On to Book Three ...

The Parade's End novels include: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926) and Last Post (1928).

*When I read this passage I could not help thinking of Vaughan Williams' very beautiful melody"The Lark Ascending" that you may listen to here. Williams wrote the composition in 1914 while watching troop ships cross the English Channel at the outbreak of the First World War.

Sylvia meets Tietjens in Rouen

On Hathahating ...

Wherefore the Hathahating?

As I pass ads for Gwyneth Paltrow's new released cookbook It's all good I shudder a little. Why does she irk me so? She used to generate (perhaps still does) such animosity amongst women in particular. Exhibit A: Katrina Onstad's recent snooty "review" in the Globe. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy Onstad's writing but this is the sort of response that Paltrow routinely provokes in women. But why? Paltrow's attractive, smart, seemingly a devoted wife and mother, a very good actress, seemingly a lovely person. It's that phrase It's all good ... I can't help thinking: everything ... is ... just ... perfect ... for ... Gwynnie. 

Now, luckily for Paltrow, and unfortunately for Anne Hathaway, she has been replaced in a phenomenon that I will describe as "the general enmity of the public towards high profile people whom we will never meet and dislike for no discernible reason ..."

But the two women have very similar qualities in the public perception and when I saw the book I finally figured out why (at least in my mind). They remind me of woman I know, S, a friend of a friend, who once looked me in the eye at a party and, speaking of her child care arrangements cooed, "I have the perfect life!" You can't point to any one quality and say she's a bad person or an evil person and yet, in our crowd, she elicits the same sort of animosity - S is a phony, S is unbearable, S is insufferable to listen to. You want to run shrieking from the room when you see her enter it.

How can I explain how annoying this sort of comment is ...  the phoniness of the "good girl" for whom everything is perfect, ideal, wonderful, great, fabulous! It's all good ... how I loathe that phrase!

Firstly, because it is a lie. Nothing is perfect especially in domestic situations. Especially for women. There's always a wrinkle, a problem, an issue. Especially if there are children and family involved. Why pretend otherwise - can you not fathom that this would annoy other women who struggle with these issues daily? The caregiver who didn't show up. The kid with the ADS. The husband who works too hard (or not enough) and is not fully engaged with the family. The failing student. The aging parent one must care for. The restricted household budget.

And so it is with Hathaway who appears to lead a charmed life except for that unfortunate Italian boyfriend who ended up in jail, he who shall not be named ...

Hathaway, too, is attractive, smart, articulate, talented, worthy of praise, award winning, a good role model for young women. But the facade is seemingly so thin and so brittle ... She appears so tightly wound. It's as if, if she revealed a true negative emotion or real fact about her life the whole edifice  would come  tumbling down in a torrid avalanche of Maybelline, glitter and pink lipstick.

And I always think, scratch at the surface of a "good girl" and you will find something else. Not a bad person but ... a dishonest person, a rigid person, who has very high expectations of herself and others and doesn't like to be thwarted or challenged.

Or ... maybe I am just a bad, bad girl and can't stand seeing anyone else be happy. Yeah, that must be it.

No it's not Gwynnie, no it's really not ...

April Cultural Roundup

From the Transformation by Fire exhibit

Exhibits
Transformation by Fire: Women Overcoming Violence through Clay at Gardiner Museum, April 8, 2013

Books: 
No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford
Perfume by Patrick Suskind 
A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Madox Ford

Film:
No (Chile) directed by Pablo Larraín

The Last Tory's Lament

Some Do Not by Ford Madox Ford (Originally published in 1924) - Part One of Parade's End 

Lured to the HBO series Parade's End, which recreates all four novels in this tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford, with promises that it would fill the lonely gap that the end of Downtown Abbey's third season finale left ... I succumbed to trying to watch the series and then decided the books had to be better. I was not wrong.

Is it not perfectly logical that a working class kid of Italian origin from a pretty rough town (like me) would be enthralled by Edwardian England in the pre-WWI years? Yes, it is inexplicable but ... there it is. And yes, I agree, it's nerdy and strange.

I confess I do not fully understand our hero Christopher Tietjens, described by some as "the last Tory"; he is sometimes so indistinct and repressed that I barely remember his name during my reading of the novel. And I admit that the morality of the pre-WWI English aristocrat is a mystery to me ... I study it as one would the mating rituals of a some obscure tribe on an inaccessible island sheltered from the world. 

When in doubt about the value of a literary work I turn to a more learned mind to determine why this is perceived as an under-appreciated classic. In this case I read Julian Barnes' essay on the books.

In short, the books detail one man's struggle (Christopher Tietjens') between his passion for a beautiful but unfaithful wife (Sylvia) and a devoted, politically minded and chaste suffragette (Valentine) who has fallen for him. This is set against the backdrop of England's entry into WWI and the chaos that ensues for Tietjens - stubbornly moral and devoted to conservative values who watches his world dissolve.

Our melancholic hero refuses to divorce his wife Sylvia, a Catholic, who quite possibly has borne a child by a previous lover taken just prior to their marriage. She manipulates Tietjens into marriage by proclaiming she is pregnant although unsure if it is his child. Sylvia and Tietjens' first encounter is a tryst on a train between two virtual strangers. Years later she leaves Tietjens to have another affair with a man named Perowne whom she eventually leaves as well.

Tietjens is a strange, lethargic, acerbic creature to our 21st c. eyes. He is described variously, as Julian Barnes noted in his own review of the books, as "a maddened horse, an ox, a swollen animal, a mad bullock, a lonely buffalo, a town bull, a raging stallion, a dying bulldog, a grey bear, a farmyard boar, a hog and finally a dejected bulldog". One wonders at the affection he elicits from the two women. He is sometimes immensely unlikeable but I believe that this is Ford's objective: "You see in such a world as this, an idealist – or perhaps it’s only a sentimentalist – must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf."

Tietjens venerates the values of the 18th c., Toryism, his son of dubious parentage Michael, and in many respects, his unfaithful wife whom he will not abandon even though it appears to her mind that he has done so emotionally. But this is not the view that Ford espoused for his protagonist. He saw him as devoted to traditional values, honorable, and ultimately losing against the tide of modernism. As Tietjens says, "I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it."

He is stubbornly committed to that which he believes this is vividly personified by his manual correction of errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica (an act that justifiably maddens Sylvia in the TV serial by the way).

That they wish to conceal Sylvia's infidelity is understandable, that Sylvia deems Tietjens "immoral" seems inexplicable - is it because he refuses to act against her and reveal her actions? Does she find his sympathy and compulsion to protect her unnatural? Unmanly? 

Lovely Rebecca Hall 
as Sylvia in the series

Sylvia returns to her husband but it seems she does so primarily to torture him with her past infidelity and her continued barbs. Before Sylvia's return from her tryst with Perowne, Tietjens falls in love with Valentine Wannop, a young suffragette, the daughter of a famous novelist once financially supported by Tietjens's father. They meet on a golf course where Valentine and a fellow suffragette are protesting for women's rights. Valentine is an intriguing character with a background that is rarely dealt with in British fiction.  

Despite Tietjens' obvious misogyny (which is casual and seems completely of its time) he has fallen for the chaste, independent minded Valentine. Here Madox is a bit maddening - fluctuating between barely concealed sexism  and sensitive portrayals of strong, complex women. 

Sylvia is overpowering and dominant, as many beautiful women can be; Valentine, likely in love for the first time, is more sympathetic and compliant, despite their combative first encounter. Tietjens reasoned thus: "If you wanted something killed you’d go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure faith that she would kill it; emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you’d go to Valentine: she’d find something to do for it ... "

Tietjens and Valentine have an intense but non-sexual relationship in Book One. However, rumours abound painting Sylvia as the injured party in the marriage with Tietjens consorting with various women, getting Valentine pregnant and slowly depleting his financial resources, none of which is true. Still Tietjens says nothing to change this impression in society for: "It was better for a boy to have a rip of a father than a whore for mother!" He refuses to divorce Sylvia because he perceives himself to be a gentleman and doesn't want to malign her; she can't divorce because she's Catholic.

Tietjens enlists in the war in 1914 (perhaps, one sometimes wonders, it is to escape these two women) and leaves for France. He returns briefly in 1917, shell shocked and suffering from a loss of memory. He finds that one of Sylvia's admirers has conspired to ruin his reputation by spreading rumours about his alleged philandering and dishonoring his cheques, suggesting that Tietjens has run into money troubles. Oddly (do these people know each other at all?) both his father and brother Mark believe the various rumours and after his father's death his brother threatens to withhold monies from Christopher. 

Sylvia comes to believe that Tietjens has bedded Valentine too because of his close relationship with Valentine and her mother Mrs. Wannop ... but the postponement of sexual gratification between Tietjens and Valentine make the chaste relationship between the Twilight lovers Edward and Bella in the YA novel seem a veritable orgy.  

Rather than fight the accusations leveled against him, Tietjens resigns from his private club (that has the dishonored cheques) and returns to the front. 

Benedict  Cumberbatch as our 
beleaguered hero Tietjens

Perhaps as a reader I am too far away from this time to appreciate Tietjens' anxieties and sense of what a gentleman should or should not do ... his reluctance to divorce, his reluctance to clear his name, his desire to protect the sometimes odious Sylvia, as if it would be undignified for him to do so, are difficult to appreciate. 
 
Sylvia, in print and on screen in this series in the form of Rebecca Hall, seems to be one of the few dynamic aspects of the tale. True, she is brutal to everyone around her, especially men: "Taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: 'But I've read all this before'."

The stream of consciousness narrative sometimes muddles the reader; it is challenging but effective enhanced by the profuse use of ellipsis as Ford segues from one thought to another. The book must be read with care. I barreled recklessly through Some Do Not (hence my resorting to Barnes to help me through it), much to my disadvantage, and have tried to be more careful with No More Parades.

Madox is sometimes maddening in letting the dialogue drag over topics - Valentine's challenging Tietjens over his use of Latin, the dithering about the dishonored cheques which amount only to a few pounds each (in book 2 there is endless mention of Tietjens having "stolen" sheets from Sylvia) - but he does have his moments of elegiac beauty largely in surveying a lovely woman or an English landscape. Tietjens loves both and through his eyes we do as well. 

The Parade's End novels include: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926) and Last Post (1928).

Saturn devouring his son

Saturn and son ... appropriately.

At Last by Edward St. Aubyn (Picador, 2011) 264 pages

This is the fifth book in the Patrick Melrose quintet of novels and I have to admit that although I enthusiastically embraced the series last year, my interest started to peter out by the fourth book Mother's Milk. You may read reviews of the first three books here, here and here (I did not review the fourth).

Perhaps that fourth book was too painful, too bitter. In that novel, Patrick's mother Eleanor had decided to leave the beautiful Melrose home in the south of France to a new age foundation that she had been fanatically devoted to in the last years of her life. St. Aubyn has a good time skewering the new age ninnies that people that novel and rightfully so. 

It was painful to read Patrick's rants against his increasingly debilitated mother who suffered a series of strokes as he wrestles with what he perceives as another betrayal - firstly, and most importantly, her inability to protect Patrick from his father's sadism and then the bequest of the house to strangers upon her imminent death. That hatred is corrosive and unrelenting. I understood it but I found it toxic to read. 

Eleanor is a dismal, poorly equipped, horribly emotionally beaten down wife and mother. When Patrick confesses to Eleanor that he had been raped by his father, she can only reply "Me too!" to her astonished son. Patrick later learns that his procreation was also the result of rape and that his father, a doctor, attempted a circumcision upon the poor infant on the kitchen table much to the horror of the women in the household, all of them powerless to stop him. Mercifully he does not give us a great many details of that incident. Perhaps in atonement for her deficiencies and lack of will as a mother, Eleanor uses her great wealth to help the underprivileged and seek spiritual enlightenment.

Well, by book five the old gal is gone and the entire book is set on the day of Eleanor's funeral and all the pertinent persons are present: avaricious Nancy, Eleanor's sister; Nicolas Pratt, a caustic friend of Patrick's father David and a representative of the old order; pious Mary, Patrick's ex-wife who has made all the funeral arrangements; Johnny Hall, once Patrick's fellow addict and friend, now a child psychotherapist; the shallow, prickly Julia, Patrick's former mistress; the dorkish intellectual Eramus, Mary's ex-lover; and the boobish Annette, representing the newly wealthy Transpersonal Foundation, the beneficiary of Eleanor's largess. 

Patrick can be an insufferable snob in his own right but he rightfully skewers his avaricious, self-obsessed family personified by his aunt Nancy who feels cheated on her own lost inheritance:

She had no prospect for getting any cash for the rest of the month ... her heroic response had been to spend as if justice had been done by cheating shopkeepers, landlords, decorators, florists, hairdressers, butchers, jewellers, and garage owners, by withholding tips from coat check girls, and by engineering rows with staff so that she could sack them without pay.

Nicholas Pratt, Patrick's father's friend, serves, I think, as a sort of father substitute saying and doing things at the funeral that one imagines the old monster himself would say. When he collapses before Johnny, who served as a psychotherapist to Nicholas' own daughter, one begins to think the title of the novel might refer to the final elimination of the vituperative older generation that almost destroys Patrick.

Amazingly, St. Aubyn writes with discretion in naming David Melrose's abuse of his son Patrick. I say amazingly because the details are horrendously autobiographical; he (and we as readers) cannot escape this past. It colours every passage, every remark that Patrick makes. 

St. Aubyn is brilliant is elucidating the poisonous ills of inherited wealth:

... the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it; the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire; the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich, generating their characteristic disguises: the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste; the defeated, the idle, and the frivolous ...

St. Aubyn writes with artistry and sophistication - perhaps too much so at times - the dialogue can be overblown, overly intellectual, overtly elegant in a manner that is spoken by virtually no one. Thomas and Robert, Patrick's sons are preternaturally articulate and wise in their precociousness - and, therefore, unbelievable as children. 

Patrick himself is literate, eloquent and desperately unhappy throughout. Not even the surprise that he has been bequeathed a tidy sum of money from a hitherto unknown family trust created by his American great grandfather and has inherited the not immodest sum of 2 million pounds, can alleviate this pain it seems. 

Perhaps I am more forgiving as a reader of this last novel as I know we are approaching the end - the end, we hope, of Patrick's torment with the death of both of his parents, his divorce from the too good to be true Mary, his final break with alcohol and substance abuse (we hope). He has endured much and somehow survived. He has remained a decent, if painfully self aware, human being. 

Jane Austen's Chair

English Regency Era Arm Chair, mid 18th c.

This day precisely marks the sixth anniversary of my first blog entry at A Lit Chick. Almost 600 blog posts and nearly 93,000 views later, I wanted to mark that occasion by talking about why I continue to write and why I think many other women write. 

It is my fate to be a geek clothed in the guise of a vixen. The things that intrigue me, preoccupy me, would likely surprise you ...

I often think back, sometimes inexplicably, to a trip that my family and my brother's family made to Dundurn Castle in Hamilton probably about ten years ago. Th Castle is an area called Burlington Heights near the Royal Botanical Gardens in the west end of Hamilton (see a virtual tour of Dundurn here). Our girls, my daughter J and my nieces B and M, were quite young, the two eldest being six or seven years old and the youngest three or four.

Dundurn Castle, a 72 room house in the style of the Regency era, was completed from 1832-1835 for Sir Allan MacNab, future prime minister of the united province of Canada from 1854 - 1856. It became famous for its grand entertainments and its uniqueness in the region. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and King Edward VII, Queen Elizabeth's great-grandfather, were feted there. It became the property of the city of Hamilton in 1900 for the modest price of $50,000.  

While we did our tour of the house the girls were likely mystified as to why we were there. My husband R and my brother C good-naturedly put up with my desire to see the Castle which I don't think I ever explored when I lived in Hamilton although I seem remember being on the grounds for some reason as a child. 

In any event ... I became a bit fixated on a certain feature of the house ... not the entrance hall, nor the impressive dining room that seated twenty and faced the lake, or Sir MacNab's writing desk and private library, the somewhat fussy but pretty ladies' bedrooms, the pink and plum-hued drawing room where guests were entertained. Neither Lady MacNab's boudoir nor the gorgeous grounds on which it stands captivated me. The rooms were not particularly elegant but rather serviceable, neat, not particularly glamorous or ostentatious.

But no, it was the furniture, specifically a chair in one of the parlors (similar to the one pictured above - which dates a little later than the era that Jane Austen lived in as she died in 1817 but bear with me reader) and the fact that, in all probability, Jane Austen had sat on a chair very similar to the one pictured. I kept staring at the chair and imagining Jane sitting there in her voluminous gowns and neat little cap.

When she wrote, Jane purportedly sat in the main parlour of the Austen home at a small writing table, scribbling on small pieces of paper that she slyly hid whenever anyone entered the room.

Why did she write in the main parlour rather than in the privacy of her own room? Why did she seemingly hide her writing? Did she feel it was a vanity for her to write? Did she do so, so that she might persuade anyone who viewed her that she was perhaps writing letters rather than fiction - a more genteel, ladylike occupation for that time? 

I started thinking of all the women who write ... at the kitchen table after the dishes are done and put away, at their office desks during after hours and at lunch, at the library down the street away from children and husbands, late into the night, early in the morning before their families wake, while the kids napped ... are we still in hiding, still working unobtrusively so that we disturb no one, alarm no one?

When I began to write I often felt guilt physically leaving the space my child and husband were in and moving to another part of the house to work. It seemed selfish, unfair to them. They were a bit resistant too ... sometimes following me up to the third floor bedroom to hang out with me. But writing a blog for the journal Descant, a literary quarterly, on arts-related issues changed that. I was firmer about the time that I needed alone and the space that I needed to do so. I had an obligation to the magazine that freed me somewhat from my guilt and inhibitions and then, based on my increased confidence, it inspired me to start my own literary blog soon after. 

Soon I started writing in the dining room, in full view. I learned to ignore the everyday noises of a shared space and no one was tempted to follow me around as I was there hiding in plain sight.

At that time I was having a great deal of difficulty writing fiction. I felt demoralized and uncertain, I feared I was losing the capacity to write and that no one was interested in what I had to say. Writing for Descant and my own blog, adhering to a strict bi-weekly schedule, forced me to keep writing. It didn't matter (somewhat) if no one read it, I needed to do it for myself. 

I love that image of Jane writing in the parlour, in full view of the family. Maybe I misunderstood her motives. Maybe she was thinking ... I have as much right as anyone to be here doing something that I love. Right here in front of everyone.

March Cultural Roundup

Rebecca Hall in Parade's End ...

Books
At Last by Edward St. Aubyn
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeanette Winterson
Democracy: A Novel by Joan Didion 
A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion 
Some Do Not by Ford Madox Ford

Films:
Stoker (U.S., 2013) directed by Park Chan-wook
Django Unchained (U.S., 2012) directed by Quentn Tarantino
Argo (U.S., 2012) directed by Ben Affleck (please see review here)
The Amazing Spiderman (U.S., 2012) directed by Marc Webb 
Parade's End (U.K., 2012), BBC/HBO five part TV serial directed by Susanna White 

The Chaperone

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty (Riverhead Books, 2012) 371 pages

I am so easily seduced ... mention the opportunity to read a piece of fiction in which one of my personal heroes plays a role and this lady is definitely for turning. I am invariably disappointed by these fictional accounts; however, it appears to be one of my addictions.

Here the future silent film actress and style icon Louise Brooks is chaperoned on a trip to NYC to audition for the Denishawn dance company in the summer of 1922. Her chaperone is a starchy Wichita, Kansas matron named Cora Carlisle. But this is not told as Brook's story really; it's mostly Cora's story and I'm afraid it's fatally dull despite its many Dickensian twists and turns.

At the turn of the 20th c., Cora was abandoned as an orphan and sent to a home for "friendless girls" run by nuns in NYC. At a very young age, she was boarded on an "orphan train" (a real historical occurrence in the U.S.) and sent across the Midwest, hopefully to be adopted by a childless couple. Cora is one of the lucky ones - selected by the kindly Kaufmans who, after a quiet and uneventful life with Cora, unfortunately die relatively young in an accident on their farm.


As a teenager, Cora is befriended and protected by the young, up and coming lawyer Alan Carlisle who is hired to represent her financial interests when her parents pass away. Alan is handsome, successful, kindly and - even in Cora's own mind - too "good" for her to marry but marry they do. Sadly, Alan has his own agenda in selecting the orphaned Cora and despite the birth of two dearly loved sons, the union evolves into a sham marriage, a cover for Alan's secrets. Moriarty manages to make even this poignant backstory dull.

Her the character of Louise Brooks is but a cartoon, a pastiche of the petulant and sometimes charming mannerisms that she often displayed in most of her films: willful, rebellious, independent. The only glimmer we have of Louise's humanity and a possible explanation for her "waywardness" is her admission in the novel that she was sexually exploited at the age of nine and then in her early teens by persons close to her. In a later scene, when the unchastened, and worse for wear, Louise returns to Wichita to run a dance studio that fails after the career in Hollywood also tanks, there is another moving scene where Cora urges Louise to leave Wichita and her vicious mother Myra to try and find happiness elsewhere. Louise attempts to do so.

But largely, Louise's characterization is paper thin - a pretext for revealing Cora's history when she returns to NYC to seek out the truth about her origins at the home for friendless girls. As is Myra. Louise's mother is a caricature of selfishness and maternal disinterest who is channeling her creativity through her more successful daughter.

Cora is boring, puritanical, racist and moralistic. She is as flat and unwavering as a Kansas cornfield. She changes a great deal, of course, but the transformation never quite seems believable or logical. Sitting next to a "coloured" woman at an all black musical revue cures her of her fear of, and distaste for, black people. Flash forward (briefly) to Cora supporting civil rights workers in the 1960s. It's a cheap ploy. If she is a racist let us understand her fears and motivations don't intercede with some phony future episode which tells us, no, not really, she really wasn't a racist. 

Similarly, the kindness of the German handyman Joseph, who helped her access her birth records, eradicates her fear of immigrants with strange accents not to mention leading her to a bizarre marital arrangement where she invites Joseph to live with her in Wichita in the home she shares with Alan.

Alan, forced to accept this and participate in the elaborate lie that Cora has found her biological brother and his daughter in NYC (in the person of Joseph and daughter Greta), quickly acquiesces to the plan to protect his own secret. Oddly, this brings harmony to the home because now both husband and wife can be with the partners of their choice under a cloak of respectability. 

Several important historical phenomenon are alluded to but never followed up on in a

More Lulu please, less Cora ...

meaningful manner: Margaret Sanger's push for birth control, the prevalence of the views of the Klu Klux Klan, the effects of WWII on American society, the treatment of an "alien" population such as the German-Americans during WWI, the fate of those unwed mothers that Cora tries to assist at "Kindness House" towards the later part of her life. These are far more interesting issues than Cora's problem with her corset of which she complains endlessly. Perhaps this is a metaphor - the corset symbolizing Cora's constrictions in a life that she finally abandons.

Still ... I have to admit that Cora bored me to tears. Her subtle racism, her prissiness, her fixation on propriety as to whether one should have one's hair down in public or speak to strangers in NYC, her adverse reaction to foreigners, her prickliness about Louise's sexual magnetism ... wear the reader down. It's only in the last fifty pages that she begins to resemble a fleshed out woman and not a caricature of small town bigotry.

I am pleased that Cora reaches a feminist epiphany about women, immigrants, blacks and homosexuals but did the novel have to take such a tedious path to do so?