Dr Tony Shaw

'Marie Antoinette Thomas', by Robert Hughes

2012-02-02T05:51:00.013Z

Marie Antoinette Goffin was the wife of Samuel Thomas (1835-1912), and the couple were grandparents of Lionel Britton, the eccentric writer who has been the subject of much of Dr Tony Shaw's work.

Legend had it that Marie came from a proud Flemish family in Belgium, who would not accept the young salesman Samuel as a suitable suitor for their daughter, and that she was banished to a convent. From there she is said to have leapt over the wall, married Samuel Thomas and lived happily ever after in wedded bliss. They had 14 children, (according to at least two accounts), 10 of whom are fully documented and five of whom lived into their nineties.

What is still unclear is who were the Goffin family? This is a common surname in Belgium, particularly in Wallonia, where Samuel Thomas himself died. (At Erquelinnes).

Elsewhere on this blog is a lovely picture of my grandfather Bob Britton with his grandmother Marie, where they are almost certainly celebrating an occasion; perhaps Marie's 80th birthday.

We know that Marie spent the last days of her life in Brussels, the supposed 80th birthday picture was almost certainly taken there, and even my mother visited her great-grandmother in Belgium as an eight-year-old child. But where was this exactly, and how can we find out about Marie's family?

Now, thanks to a remarkable coup by my cousin David Guillaume, we have new information! He has seen a way to jog the memory of another cousin, Maurice Rogers, and Maurice has provided material which is very exciting: an envelope sent by Marie in what appears to be 1928.

The address was 11 Rue Hydraulique, Saint Josse. Below is an image of this property from 1993. We hope very much that it has not been knocked down to make way for one of the European Commission office blocks! (Number 11 is on the left).Now can anyone tell us something about this property and the family who lived there? Does anyone know someone who might have been part of the Goffin family?

A further clue is in a letter from Ida Thomas, who, before she died at 102 years old, wrote in a letter that after Samuel died her grandmother Marie Antoinette had gone to live in Brussels with her sister Therese, and that a niece or grand-niece was named Mercedes.

Please may we hear from any Goffin family who know anything about this, or anyone who knows about 11 Rue Hydraulique?

Jean Echenoz: Courir ('Running') (2008)

2012-02-01T17:52:00.008Z

Courir, with its protagonist's globetrotting activities, is in some respects not dissimilar, for instance, to the wanderings of the protagonist in Un an (A Year) (1997), or the Arctic adventures in Je m'en vais (I'm Off ) (1999), and can therefore easily be included in Echenoz's 'geographical novels' section: movement is a frequent theme with the writer. This is also the second of his three biographical novels, chronologically coming between Ravel (2006), which concerns the final three years of Maurice Ravel's life (although concentrating on the earlier four months of the composer's American tour), and Des éclairs, concerning Nikola Tesla's life.

The subject of Courir is the Czech Émile Zátopek (1922–2000), one of the world's greatest long-distance runners, and the narrative follows the athlete through his successes in such cities as Oslo, Berlin, London, Helsinki, and Sao Paulo, to his eventual decline and (almost) professional end at the Olympic Games in Melbourne. The narrator treats Émile with warmth, humor, and with a casual, conversational style, and there's a rare first person intervention near the end of one chapter toward the end of the book: 'I don't know about you but me, with all these exploits, records, victories, trophies, I'd perhaps start to have had enough of it.'

Politics is never far from the story, and the first sentence of the novel begins in the late 1930s (when Émile is in his late teens) with the German occupation of Moravia, whereas the final chapter begins with the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Émile has moved from playful youthful defiance of the Germans' authority to serious open defiance of the Russians, for which the Russians try to shame him by making him work as a dustman, and when that fails because he's too popular they send him to the countryside to make holes in the ground for telegraph poles.

After a few years, he is asked to sign a 'confession' that exonerates the Russians far more than himself, and he is then given a job in the basement of the government sports information center as an archivist. Émile says his probably didn't deserve anything better.

Blandine Le Callet: Une pièce montée ('A Wedding Cake') (2006)

2012-01-31T18:32:00.003Z

The translation of the title Une pièce montée is 'A Wedding Cake', although it could also refer to a play being put on, and indeed Vincent's fiancée Bérangère had originally wanted their wedding to be just that: 'une pièce de théâtre', an 'unforgettable performance', which is so very appropriate a description of the main players in this novel. Bérangère wants to keep to the three unities, but although as far as the book is concerned the main action takes place in a day, there are many digressions and a number of sub-plots that take us to a number of places at various times. And from the moment the director Bérangère has revealed her intentions, Vincent begins to feel that he is co-starring in a performance to which he hasn't even been invited.

The cover of the Poche edition is also very appropriate, with its photo of the top of a tiered wedding cake showing a very stiff and artificial-looking bride and groom tilted at an angle that almost indicates that they are falling over. The bourgeoisie are mercilessly attacked here for their callousness, their artificiality, and the fact that their bien-pensant veneer conceals astonishing hypocrisies.

At the end of the novel, near the end of the wedding reception, Bérangère learns something from her dying grandmother Madeleine that no one else knows: that her grandfather was not her biological grandfather, and that her grandparents' marriage was a loveless pretence to conceal the fact that Bérangère's mother was conceived out of wedlock. Suddenly Bérangère's certainties disappear and she seeks reassurance that her marriage will last. And Bérangère is concerned with things lasting, concerned that she should have the best material goods in her marriage, ones that will be passed on to her unborn children as heirlooms. Material goods are vital to her, going hand in hand with appearances that sometimes hide an unpleasant reality.

Une pièce montée is in nine sections, each narrated in the third person and corresponding to a character attending the wedding or wedding reception. From the beginning, we learn the importance of appearances from the eight-year-old Pauline, who has witnessed Lucie being removed from view of the camera by Bérangère and her sister Laurence; a little later we learn from the (disturbed but definitely not crazy) priest Bertrand that Lucie has Down's syndrome; near the end of the book (in a pre-wedding sequence) we learn that Lucie is Vincent's niece, and that Bérangère is horrified that she is to be a bridesmaid, even horrified by Lucie's existence in the family – which is a source of some friction between the engaged couple.

The wedding uncovers the jealousies, arguments, anger, neuroses, but most of all intolerance (especially of difference) lurking beneath the apparently smooth, well-heeled surface of these people, and the message seems to be that convention is deadly. Rebellion, on the other hand, is a very healthy thing, and (along with Bertrand's rebellion by speeding through a wedding ceremony in which no one is interested) is manifested by Pauline's refusal to smile in the photos Lucie is excluded from, and by Marie and Agnès's coming out ceremony, when they walk onto the dance floor for a slow, and passionately kiss.

Many actions and many people are crammed into this 250-page book, and although it's not always easy to work out the relationships, it's well worth the effort.

(But from what I've seen and heard of the film version La Pièce montée (note the change of article), it seems to take far too many liberties with the original material. I'll probably give it a miss.)

Tahar Ben Jelloun: La Nuit sacrée (The Sacred Night) (1987)

2012-01-30T00:29:00.000Z

Ben Jelloun's La Nuit sacrée won the prix Goncourt in its year of publication, and is the sequel to L'Enfant du sable (The Sand Child) (1985). Both books take place in Morocco, and in the earlier novel the businessman father of the family seeks a family heir, which in this patriarchal society means that it must be a son. However, his wife gives birth to an eighth daughter. Deprived of a maculine descendant and facing humiliation and the future disinheritance of his immediate family in favor of that of his obnoxious elder brother, the father decides effectively to deprive his daughter Zahra of her female identity by concealing her gender from everyone and bringing her up as a son – Ahmed.

La Nuit sacrée continues the story on the father's deathbed, when he reveals Zahra's true sexual identity to her, the night before her twentieth birthday.* As one life ends, so one begins, and her father's death is not one of mourning for Zahra but 'A Very Beautiful Day', as she goes into the world to discover her identity as a woman.

Throughout the novel it is not always entirely clear what is real and what not, as some narrative sequences mix with dream elements, stories, and magic, although the feminist message is always clear.

When she begins her journey she taken by a cavalier to a perfumed garden peopled by children, and later continues through a wood where she undergoes a slightly ambiguous rape, and from there she goes to a hammam (Moorish or Turkish baths) whose attendant L'Assise (or The Seated One) has her stay at her home for some months, where she looks after her blind brother, the Consul.

Eventually Zahra begins a sexual relationship with the Consul, which is a revelation to her, and she comes to love the blind man. She realizes this can't last, and soon L'Assise (jealous and bitter) seeks out Zahar's uncle, who is furious at her deceit and accuses her of stealing his family's inheritance. Zahra thinks nothing of shooting him dead, but she is imprisoned. While in prison, her resentful sisters find her and subject her to clitoridectomy and infibulation.

Among other things, La Nuit sacrée is a dreamlike, poetic coming-of-age novel that is also a love story, a horror story, and feminist tract. And like L'Enfant du sable, it's been translated into English.

*This takes place on the 27th night of the month of Ramadan, or Lailatul Qadr', 'The Night of Destiny' ('La Nuit du destin') as the chapter is entitled, in fact it's the sacred night of the book's title.

Richard Ayodade's Submarine (2010), Joe Dunthorne, and an Oulipian digression

2012-01-26T23:12:00.007Z

Submarine is a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Swansea, Wales, and the socially inept 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) wants to lose his virginity to his girlfriend Jordana (Yasmin Paige), although he's also very concerned that the marriage of his parents – the extremely constipated Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill (a slightly exaggerating Sally Hawkins) – is threatened by Jill's relationship with her old flame Graham (Paddy Considine), a new age performer.

With parents like these, Oliver can perhaps be excused the problems he has communicating, excused his self-absorption, and even excused his hopelessly misguided attempts to solve problems.

The obvious references have been made by critics – Nouvelle Vague cinema influence, Catcher in the Rye, Woody Allen, Roeg's evil dwarf in Don't Look Now, Adrian Mole, etc. The film works because it's (sometimes rather blackly) funny, because it's well acted (especially by Roberts and Paige), because Ayodade is so assured (occasionally too much so), and because Alex Turner's music is wistful and in keeping with the period.

Now, who's Joe Dunthorne? He wrote the novel (his first) on which this movie is based, which was published in 2008, and as far as I can tell (not having read it) the movie seems to be faithful to it. Dunthorne was a contributor to a collection of poems published under the title Generation txt, and he now has a new novel, Wild Abandon, which is set in the early 1990s, and apparently also has two suberb young people. I'll look out for that.

Interestingly, Dunthorne is also an admirer of Georges Perec, and his short article in the Guardian on three Perec translations is here. However – and coming a little later is one of my grouses that I may have made before but if so it bears repeating – Dunthorne calls Gilbert Adair's A Void (a translation of Perec's La Disparition) a 'virtuoso translation'. I assume that Dunthorne has read both the original and the translation, otherwise his statement wouldn't make sense. One of the other translations he mentions is Ian Monk's The Exeter Text, which Monk translates from Perec's Les Revenentes. Monk, like Perec, belongs to Oulipo (which Perec still does, even though he's dead), but his verdict on Adair's translation is very different: he says that he 'found it an amusing work in its own right but, as a translation, frankly disappointing'. And he goes on to state his reasons for this, which are very interesting, particularly (for me) the fact that Adair missed the French pangram, and his 'translation' of it renders the sentence meaningless as such. You'll have to scroll a little, but any reader of Adair's book should read this. Rant over, and yes, I know I've highjacked my own post.

Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony (1977)

2012-01-26T14:01:00.001Z

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is of Native American, Mexican American, and white blood. She grew up in the Laguna Pueblo reservation and has written the novels Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Gardens of the Dunes (2001) as well as several books of poetry.

Ceremony, her first novel, is a very powerful book. After six years fighting in the Philippines and surviving the Bataan Death March as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, the young Native American Tayo returns to the States. Suffering from battle fatigue, he is initially sent to the mental ward of the veterans' hospital in California. He then moves to Laguna Pueblo, where he has been living with his aunt, who is the sister of the mother who has deserted him, and is the mother of his cousin and friend Rocky with whom he left to join the war, but who has not survived. Tayo lives with ghosts, and is still ill.

In war, he and his Native American friends experienced a slim but not insignificant (although sometimes morbidly ironic) kind of equality: although white people weren't cheering them as much as the uniform they wore, they nevertheless 'got the same medals for bravery, the same flag over the coffin'. But there is a return to alienation when the uniform has gone, and at stores Tayo has to wait to be served after the whites, and the 'white lady at the bus depot' is very careful to slide his change over the counter to avoid touching him.*

His friends attempt to medicate themselves with drink and degenerate into alcoholism and violence, but Tayo finds this unsatisfactory, and anyway he is still the victim of a double alienation: from both white and Native American society because he is of mixed blood.

His grandmother tries to get the medecine man Ku'oosh to cure him, but Ku'oosh is too steeped in Indian culture, and is unable to cure contemporary ills that have their roots in white society. So Tayo visits another medecine man – Betonie – who lives on the edge of another reservation, near the white town of Gallup, and who is familiar with both white and Native American cultures.

The ceremony now begins, and although there is no quick fix, what Betonie has taught him will lead him away from his false friends in the 'cold Coors hospital' identifying with the destruction that the whites have brought to Native American civilization. It will lead Tayo towards a greater understanding of his past, of what he is. Towards health.

Ceremony isn't structured in a linear fashion and passages from the past, in the manner of Tayo's thoughts, are juxtaposed to the present. Poems – stories of Native American culture – both frame the novel and punctuate it, serving as ceremonies, weapons against illness, death, evil: the wherewithal for life itself.

*cf. Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable.

Ellen Glasgow: The Sheltered Life (1932)

2012-01-23T23:09:00.011Z

In Pioneers & Caretakers: A study of 9 American Women Novelists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1965]), Louis Auchincloss sees Ellen Glasgow as 'the necessary bridge between the world of Thomas Nelson Page and the world of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams.' The Sheltered Life is generally considered to be one of – if not the – best of Glasgow's novels.

This is the final novel of Glasgow's Queenborough Trilogy, following The Romantic Comedians (1929) and They Stooped to Folly (1929), and Queenborough is a model for the city of Richmond in Virginia where Glasgow spent most of her life.

The novel begins in the early years of the 20th century and (after a gap of eight years) ends shortly after the beginning of World War I, when the South was still very slowly adjusting to the changes after the Civil War (1861–65) and Reconstruction (1865–77). Washington Street only houses two remaining stalwart Old South families, the Birdsongs (of whom Eva and her husband George are of central importance) and the Archbalds (of whom Jenny Blair (aged nine and 17–18) and her grandfather the General (aged 84 at the end) are of central importance).

Eva represents the Southern belle (or the older Southern lady) who strives to maintain her dignity while her husband strives to conceal his philandering activities, although both fail miserably.

The pervasive stench from the chemical works is a constant reminder of the hegemony of the industrial New South to this redoubt of the aristocratic agrarian Old South, whose principal defensive strategy is maintaining appearances. For Eva, 'Keeping up an appearance is more than a habit [...]. It is a second nature.' However, it's obvious that things around them are falling apart, and the image of the mother of Jenny's friend Bena as 'a Confederate flag in the rain' is very appropriate. Eva can't keep up the pretence, and breaks down: 'I'm worn out with being somebody else – with being somebody's ideal'. And then when she leaves hospital and finds George in the arms of the 18-year-old Jenny Blair she shoots him dead, but appearances have to be kept up: he shot himself, didn't he?

Ellen Glasgow's The Sheltered Life is a powerful attack on the cult of domesticity, the ideal of womanhood, the exclusion of women from public life, the mental suicide that Old Southern patriarchal society imposed on women. In some respects, I'm not so sure that's it's a wholly historical story: surely certain ingrained attitudes remain today?

The house where Glasgow lived in Richmond is still there, although it is now a business concern. Shots I took of the exterior in 2009 are here.

In addition, there's an thesis online by Emma Domínguez i Rué entitled 'Ellen Through the Looking-Glass: Female Invalidism as Metaphor in the Fiction of Ellen Glasgow', which is split into three sections, and the links are here: Section One, Section Two, and Section Three.

Éric Fottorino: Baisers de cinéma (2007)

2012-01-18T14:35:00.004Z

On the first page of Éric Fottorino's Baisers de cinéma ('Cinema Kisses') there is a mention of the fire that occurs at the end, and fire is a prefigurative image in a number of various guises: for instance, Gilles Hector remembers, as a child, his father Jean playfully saying 'You're red hot!' ('Tu brûles!') when he was very close to objects he'd hidden; and the narrator Gilles admits that he's playing with fire by becoming the love slave of the capricious Mayliss de Carlo. But there's twist at the end.

Baisers de cinéma is an unconventional love story, but also a detective story reminiscent of Patrick Modiano's work, where the narrator liberally punctuates the novel with references to locations in central Paris. Gilles owes his existence to a 'cinema kiss' between his cinema photographer father and his unknown mother and tries to cast light on who she was, watching numerous movies as part of this search – the nouvelle vague cinema plays an important part in the narrative. It's during one such movie visit that he meets the married Mayliss, and they become lovers, consumed by a very powerful passion.

And guess what? Yes, there are no English translations of Éric Fottorino's novels.

Belinda Cannone

2012-01-17T17:07:00.005Z

Until this morning, when I read a review in this month's Magazine littéraire of novelist and essayist Belinda Cannone's La Chair du temps (literally 'The Flesh of Time'), I wasn't aware of her existence. Last March she arrived at her house in the country to find that two trunks, containing many years of her diaries, notebooks, photos and correspondence, had been stolen. Her shock was immense, and she wrote frantically to try to fill the void, to right the wrong, and this book is an attempt to render the intimate 'extimate'. Obviously, I had to find out more about Barbara Cannone.

Cannone – a university lecturer in Comparative Literature at Caen – wrote and published her thesis about writers and music in France in the second half of the 18th century, and music is a preoccupation in her work.

So too is desire. The novel Lent Delta (1998) – literally 'Slow Delta' – is an exploration of the desire to live seen through the eyes of a woman on her final day of 104 years of life; and the novel L'Homme qui jeûne (2006) – literally 'The Fasting Man' – is the negative image of desire. L’Écriture du désir (2001) – literally 'The Writing of Desire' – is an essay which examines desire in general and its relationship to literary practice.

Last year she published Le Baiser peut-être – literally 'The Kiss Perhaps' –which was the first of a series of books to be written by different people on universal subjects. For Cannone, the kiss represents the most beautiful gesture of desire, a fusion, when self joins other, and there is a brief talk for Mollat on YouTube in which she also extends the word: when she writes, she leans toward the reader in desire, in a kind of kiss, and hopes that the reader will make a similar gesture toward her. The fascinating eight-minute interview, in French – and in which, for instance, she covers the prostitute (who doesn't kiss because she can sell her body but not her desire), Diderot (Cannone's 'dance master'), and Dante (Paulo and Francesca) – is here.

Last year I noted that Laurent Mauvignier – a startling and original French writer – has been barely translated into English. Consulting the Library of Congress and the British Library websites, the indication is that no work of Cannone's has been translated into English. Perhaps, once again, this is a case of a writer's work just being too French for an English readership, in spite of the universal themes.

The Greensboro sit-ins, North Carolina, 1960

2012-01-16T11:30:00.004Z

I covered O. Henry in Greensboro some time back, but I forgot to add this one. On 1 February 1960 four African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down at F. W. Woolworth's lunch counter on 132 South Elm Street. Following the store's segregation policy, they were asked to leave. They remained in the store and encouraged others to make a peaceful protest there over some days. By the fourth day 300 joined in the demonstration and shortly it spread to other stores and other cities. When the protesters started boycotting segregated stores, Woolworth's profits fell sharply, and on 26 July the chain dropped its segregation policy.

The effect of the demonstrations was far-reaching, and it is evident that they played a part in leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which illegalized racial segregation.

The International Civil Rights Center & Museum is now inside the former Woolworth store.

The sculpture Cup of Freedom, by Charles Jenkins, was installed outside the museum in January 2010. Below it is a quotation:

'I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold thes truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.'

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The plaque entitled 'Birth of the Civil Rights Movement' is also outside the museum, and is a representation of the 'Greensboro Four': Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (who became Jibreel Khazan), Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond.

Dun Karm in Msida, Malta

2012-01-15T12:41:00.002Z

Dun Karm (1871-1961), or Carmelo Psaila, was born in Żebbuġ, Malta, and I previously made a post about him nearly two years ago. I've now discovered a photo I took some years ago in Msida, which shows a bust of him with a verse at the side. My original post is here.

The Old General in Nottingham General Cemetery

2012-01-14T22:53:00.006Z

Well, there's a commemorative plaque at least, which I omitted to include in a blog post last September about Benjamin Mayo (aka The Old General), one of Nottingham's most noted eccentrics.

But the slate is no longer in its place: it has been propped against the wall below the framework that held it. It reads:

'BENJAMIN MAYO

COMMONLY KNOWN BY THE NAME OF

"THE OLD GENERAL"

DIED IN THE NOTTINGHAM

UNION WORK-HOUSE

12TH JANUARY 1843, AGED 64 YEARS.

A FEW INHABITANTS OF THIS TOWN,

ASSOCIATING HIS PECULIARITIES AND ECCENTRICITIES,

WITH REMINISCENCES OF THEIR EARLY BOYHOOD,

HAVE ERECTED THIS TABLET

TO HIS MEMORY.

See HONES' "EVERY DAY BOOK Vol. 2nd Page 1570.'

My previous blog post is here: The Old General.

Éric Faye: Nagasaki (2010)

2012-01-12T18:34:00.003Z

Éric Faye borrowed the basic outline of a story that appeared in several Jananese newspapers in 2008 in order to construct this short novel set in Nagasaki.

Shimura is a 56-year-old meteorology worker with regular, sober habits who can't understand how food and drink can be disappearing from his fridge. He becomes preoccupied with it and installs a webcam in his kitchen to spy on the intruder from the office. Eventually he sees a woman, and on one occasion when he spots her making a cup of tea he phones the police. The police break in and find a 58-year-old woman hiding in the house in a small room – in fact more of a futon cupboard.

Shimura is in for a shock when the police inform him that the unemployed woman has made a duplicate key and been living in the house for nearly a year. There follows a court case as a result of which the woman is imprisoned for five months, and in which Shimura, who finds it very difficult to live in the house any more, nevertheless behaves without malice towards her.

There are three narrators in the book – Shimura, the woman, and a third person who has access to the woman's thoughts. The last two take over the narrative towards the end, when the woman gives an account of the difficulties and the joys she received living in clandestinity, and when the third person narrator describes her leaving prison, seeing with distress that the now empty house is for sale, and visiting it with the estate agent.

The woman – who, like Shimura, has no romantic interest in the other – had intended to see Shimura after release, and is even surprised that he didn't visit her in prison. The estate agent allows her to write to him through the agency, but the long, intelligent – even philosophical – letter of explanation is a little different from her police statement. A very interesting story.

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

2012-01-11T15:59:00.004Z

For a time now I've realized that for some reason – or more likely for no reason at all – I've been neglecting to read Tennessee Williams's work, but after reading A Streetcar Named Desire I'm beginning to see what I've been missing. Blanche Dubois represents the decaying Old South, Stanley Kowalski the new aggressive spirit, and essentially Streetcar is a playoff between the two principal characters.

But almost everything in the play seems to take on a symbolic significance: the name of the streetcar and its ironic destination (Elysian Fields, which is replacing Belle Rêve) is perhaps all too obvious, but Stella's and Blanche's lives too are a compromise between old and new – although the new wins hands down, totally dominating both women. Stella has left the beautiful dream, although sexually she's still starry-eyed. But the aptly named Blanche, the ghost of Belle Rêve – and the language of the name prefigures the French atmosphere of the urban New Orleans, while the grammatically incorrect feminine adjective (it should of course be the masculine 'Beau') evokes the two faded Southern belles – Blanche has had to resort to prostitution as the dream crumbled: the Old South is screwed, gone with the wind, and Stella has succumbed, although Blanche still clings to the dream to the point of insanity. In the end she refuses to wake up and smell the testosterone of the poker (poke her?) players who know the geography, and the play's final word is 'stud': the stallion energy (personified above all by Stanley, the phallocratic Pole) has won the game.

Williams's frequent correspondent Donald Windham calls Williams's work 'repressed self-knowledge', and certainly this play seems to contain autobiographical elements, disguised though they may be. Certainly the mental illness of Williams's beloved sister Rose seemed to be in some way subsumed into Blanche's character. And then there's all the gender play, Blanche's homosexual husband, her mixture of fragility and drink-bolstered defiance, the poker and the heavy drinking (as seen Williams's father), etc.

In her introductory commentary to the edition shown above, Patricia Hern mentions that Williams was influenced by D. H. Lawrence, but her quotation from Lady Chatterley's Lover, spoken by the eponymous aristocrat's sister Hilda about Connie's lover Mellors, seems to reveal a little more than the suggested threat and alienation: 'And men like you [...] ought to be segregated: justifying their own vulgarity and selfish lust.' The analogy is clear: Lady Chatterley is dominated, destroyed even, by the working-class sexuality of Mellors in a similar way that the Southern belles Stella and Blanche are destroyed by the working-class sexuality of Kowalski: the aristocracies of both England and the American South are dying. But doesn't what Hilda says seem remarkably appropriate to the South? 'Segregated'? Like the Southern blacks under Jim Crow, whose sexuality had been so feared by the whites, and whose Southern Lady stood as such a bulwark against that power? Is the sentence pure coincidence, or was Lawrence (maybe just subconsciously) thinking of the South?

Women Writers of Nottingham

2012-01-10T18:02:00.007Z

Last March the Nottingham Women's History Group published the booklet 'Women of Nottingham: A Walk around the City Centre'. As several of the women featured were writers, I decided to follow this part, although my route is not the same as in booklet. A few of the associated sites are pretty tenuous, but that in no way detracted from my interest in the exercise.

This medieval structure at the corner of Castle Road and Castle Gate was once known as 'Severns', and was moved here in 1970 from Middle Pavement several hundred yards away. It became the Lace Centre after some years, illustrating an industry in which largely women were employed.

Grass and wild flowers hang over the guttering, and the building is now for sale.

The booklet notes that Hilda Lewis (1896–1974) wrote historical fiction, and that the novel Penny Lace is about the local industry.

I reproduce this from a previous post I made on the busts of writers displayed outside the entrance to Nottingham Castle Museum, which shows Mary Howitt (1799–1888), who was mainly noted for her poetry, with her husband William.

Ann Gilbert (1782–1866), who was born Taylor and a children's poet like her younger sister Jane (who is best remembered for 'Twinkle Little Star'), lived here at 51 Castle Gate from 1830. Ann was also a literary critic and established the Nottingham Ladies' Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves. Her son Josiah wrote Cadore: or, Titian's Country, and also edited Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs Gilbert.

Abigail Gawthern (1757–1822) spent most of her mature life at 26 Low Pavement. A rich property owner, she left a diary the recording in great detail the events of her life.

The artist Laura Knight (1917–70) was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, went to Nottingham School of Art, and was once a member of the Nottingham School of Artists. I include her here because she wrote two autobiographies: Oil Paint and Grease Paint (1936) and The Magic of a Line (1965).

Charles I raised his standard on a mound behind this slightly vandalized plaque. The Governor of Nottingham Castle was one of the signatories of Charles's death warrant, and his wife – the translator and poet Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81) – wrote Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson.

Lord Byron lived here at 76 St James's Street in 1798 when he was attending hospital, although of course he was not here when his wife Annabella Milbanke gave birth to their daughter Augusta Ada. Ada Lovelace (1815–51) is noted for her work with Charles Babbage's on his analytical engine.

For good measure and because I find it attractive, I include a building not – as far as I'm aware – associated with any writer, but which is also included in the walk. The Rotunda, which was the Jubilee Ward section of the General Hospital, was built in 1897 to commemorate Queen Victoria's jubilee, and the booklet seems to include it because earlier this century it was 'the venue for the Lesbian club, Eternity'.

This is an interesting booklet that brings attention to several writers who are not exactly widely known – not even to that many people in Nottingham, I suspect – so it is most welcome.

One woman not mentioned, though, is the indefatigable Constance Penswick Smith, who campaigned for the revival of Mothering Sunday in the first half of the 20th century, and who wrote a number of books and plays on the subject.

One major complaint – not about the booklet, but about a comment in the Nottingham Women's History Group website, where it mentions a talk on Nottingham women in sport as being 'In celebration of the Olympics'. What? 'Women of Nottingham' has drawn attention to minority groups and mentions not just women but homosexual women, working-class women, etc, and yet the group publishing this booklet appears to applaud one of the most obscene actions perpetrated in this country in many years: the Olympic Games, which has caused the destruction of a huge area of London, and one that was significantly peopled and enjoyed by those far less fortunate than many from other parts of London. Please read this link for a small indication of the horrors performed in the siting of the Olympic Games, which has been studied in great depth by our tireless national treasure Iain Sinclair.

Prejudice, and Harper Lee's and Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird

2012-01-05T12:17:00.008Z

Over the holidays I chanced upon the DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird, and although I'd seen the movie before and read the book two or three times, as it's always been a favorite of mine I decided to buy it. At the time I didn't realize that the main theme of the narrative – the obscenity of prejudice – would prove to be so topical this week, when two Englishmen were finally found guilty of a horrific racially motivated murder commited almost two decades previously.

We have fictional, smalltown Maycomb (loosely modeled on Monroeville), Alabama in the Jim Crow era of the early 1930s, and real Eltham, suburb of bigtown London, UK, in the early 1990s. Ostensibly, there are huge differences in time, general culture, etc, and yet I don't see much difference between the poison of Bob Ewell and the poison of Gary Dobson and David Norris.

Disturbingly, Norris, who lived in a £300,000 mansion and whose family had never been short of money in his sixteen years, had rarely left south-east London, and had never been north of the River Thames. Insularity breeds contempt.

To return to Mockingbird, there is of course a parallel narrative that feeds into that of Tom Robinson's toward the end, and just as Robinson is the outsider in the powerful white world of the South, Boo Radley with, to quote Sheriff Heck Tate, 'his shy ways' is very much the white outsider in a more extroverted world he can't fit into.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the great novels of 20th century American literature, and the movie – strongly endorsed by Lee – also has a power which, as director Robert Mulligan suggests, it would not have been possible to display in a world fed on MTV, in which many people would be easily bored by the long scenes.

Mulligan made that remark during the Director's Commentary, a special feature on the DVD where he and producer Alan J. Pakula discuss the actors and the events in the film. What I hadn't considered before is that the movie (which in spite of a number of small differences is largely very faithful to the book) is a real oddity as the book is essentially uncinematic, and apart from the courtroom scene the major events take place offstage and we learn of them (the killing of the black Tom Robinson, the killing of of the crazed racist Ewell) secondhand.

Pakula would go on to direct his own films, and a preoccupation with technology is apparent in virtually all of them. This is particularly so with his characters' use of the phone, which is frequently employed as a dramatic device to increase tension, often being the harbinger of important news. But perhaps the Pakula movie that springs to mind most is All the President's Men, with the Watergate tapes which proved so damning to Nixon. Significantly, of course, it was technology in the form of the police bugging of Dobson's flat that helped in bringing (as yet just two of) the murderers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. Technology was a little too primitive in the days when Mockingbird is set, although the insane primitiveness of racial prejudice is still with us.

Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge, The Berkshires, Massachusetts

2012-01-04T22:07:00.010Z

The painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) – most remembered for his Saturday Evening Post covers, and perhaps especially among those his Willie Gillis series – moved from Arlington, Vermont to Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1953. The Norman Rockwell Museum, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, holds the largest original collection of Rockwell's work, and has been at 9 Route 183, on a thirty-six acre site, since 1993. One large room houses all 322 of his Saturday Evening Post covers. Other rooms give some insight into his more socially concerned paintings, of his frustration with the restrictions caused by the demands for whimsical cutesiness: the racial issue in 'The Problem We All Live With' (1964) is of course the most famous example of this maturity. No photography allowed, as might be expected.

'NORMAN ROCKWELL'S STUDIO

Norman Rockwell wanted his studio to be preserved for museum visitors to learn about his working process. In 1976, he placed his studio and all of its furnishings and equipment in trust to The Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge. In 1986, the contents were carefully packed, and the studio building was moved from South Street to its new site. As in its original location, the studio's large windows face north and the building continues to overlook the Housatonic River.

The relocation and restoration of Norman Rockwell's studio was made possible by the generosity of Kraft General Foods.'

The studio does not reflect the state it was in at the time the museum came into possession of it, but an earlier, more productive time.

And that time was October 1960, when Rockwell was finishing Golden Rule, which was published on the Saturday Evening Post cover of 1 April 1961.

Another part of the studio.

Also on the museum site is Linwood House, built by New York attorney Charles Butler in 1859 as his family's summer retreat and named after the novel The Linwoods (1835), which was written by relative and Stockbridge resident Catherine Maria Sedgwick . This and similar summer houses were known as 'Berkshire cottages'. The setting is beautifully picturesque, and Rockwell used to cycle here every day from the center of Stockbridge, at the same time getting to know the Musgrave family who had inherited the property. Structurally this house is the same as in Charles Butler's day, and it now forms the museum's administrative nucleus.

Around the museum are a number of sculptures. This one is a representation of children by Peter Rockwell, Norman's son.

This is by John Catalano, and is titled The Shaman.

On the way back to the parking lot by the entrance, visitors are requested to ring a large bell if they enjoyed themselves. We both clanged it vigorously: it had been a great way to spend a wet day.

The Oxford American: Thirteenth Annual Southern Music Issue (2011)

2012-01-02T14:25:00.073Z

Although now published in Conway, Arkansas, The Oxford American takes its name from its original place of publication: Oxford, Mississippi. This quarter is the magazine's thirteenth annual Southern music issue, which this year includes a CD compilation of music from Mississippi.

A few of the tracks are by well-known musicians such as Howlin' Wolf and Bo Diddley, but most of them are less famous.

Jimmy Donley (1929–63) from Jonestown near Gulfport sings 'Radio, Jukebox, and T.V.', and Ben Ehrenreich's article on Donley begins with the sentence 'Take a tour of loneliness.', which is as much an introduction to Donley's life than the song itself. Donley was married several times in his short – often poverty-burdened, often drink-sodden – 33 years. He had psychiatric problems, was violent, and was no stranger to the inside of a prison cell. Collectively, the mere titles many of his songs appear to scream his despair: 'I'm Alone', 'You're Why I'm So Lonely', 'I Really Got the Blues', 'Oh How It Hurts', and the very telling 'Born to Be a Loser' – which became the title of a 1992 biography by Johnnie Allan and Bernice Larson Webb – seems to sum up his sorry life. But it would be difficult to find a more appropriate title than 'Stop the Clock': Donley succeeded in asphyxiating himself to death with the exhaust fumes of his car.

Megan Mayhew Bergman gives a fascinating account of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Originally called The Swinging Rays of Rhythm, the Sweethearts came out of Dr Laurence C. Jones's (African American) Piney Woods School a little more than twenty miles south of Jackson. In fact, the girls escaped from it: initially serving as fund raisers for the school, they decided to go their own way and earn more money. Recruiting more musicians of different races, they became the first racially integrated all-girl band, and in a time of war when their male big band counterparts were being called up, they very adequately filled the gap. With difficulty they lasted until 1949, through the boys' return, the intolerance of Jim Crow, internal difficulties, and changing musical fashions.

Words certainly can be off-putting, as Nikil Saval noted on first hearing of Milton Babbitt because automatically the surname triggered off associations with the eponymous central character of Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt. He thought of 'American philistinism' in relation to the novel, although I think 'American conformity' is more apt. No matter, as neither expression can be applied to Milton Babbitt's music. Quite the reverse, and Babbitt's experimental 'Post Partitions' is an amazing piano composition. Babbitt wrote a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone system (or twelve-tone composition), but it was not published until many years later in 1992, when he was also awarded a PhD for it by Princeton University.

As usual, though, I'm drawn as if by magnetic force to the obscurities here:

––– Mattie Delaney, the blues singer who appears to have only ever recorded two tracks, in 1930, at the famous Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, and who has been covered by Rory Block and Lucinda Williams.

––– John Stirratt is well known as Wilco's bassist, but his early days in Oxford, MS with The Hilltops are far less so. I must listen to more on Oxford American's website as 'Sidewalk' is wondrous stuff.

––– And I must also take up OA's offer in the magazine to 'experience more Henry Green' by checking out that website some more. 'Storm thru Mississippi', inspired by the 1936 tornados, is scary, wrathful, Old Testament preaching. Nicholas Rombes's article doesn't seem to give any indication who the man was, although his very common name is a big setback to finding out.

––– The Riviaires were two kids smitten by The Beatles' music in their early teens, and Ralph 'Wattsy' Watts's very youthful voice emphasizes the fact. Wattsy and the drummer Bill Latham released this themselves (with a brief instrumental on the B-side), and their parents footed the bill. But there were no more records from The Rivieres, as they were just having fun.

––– Finally, from Jackson come The Germans, a punk band with lead vocalist Carla Wescott making wonderful noises, ditto the startling guitar playing of Sherry Cothren.

This is the list of the tracks on the CD:

1. Harold Dorman: 'Uncle Jonah’s Place' (1961)

2. Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band: 'What Can You Bring Me' (1971)

3. Ernie Chaffin: 'I'm Lonesome' (1957)

4. Bo Diddley: 'Heart-O-Matic Love' (1955)

5. Mattie Delaney: 'Tallahatchie River Blues' (1930)

6. Fern Kinney: 'I'm Ready for Your Love' (1982)

7. Leon Bass & the Keystones: 'Love-A-Rama' (c. 1956)

8. Joe Henderson: 'Snap Your Fingers' (1962)

9. Hayden Thompson: 'Blues, Blues, Blues' (1956)

10. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: 'Jump Children' (1946)

11. Howlin' Wolf: 'Howlin' for My Darling' (1959)

12. Dusty Brooks: '(My Baby Loves) Chili Dogs' (1951)

13. Ruby Andrews: 'Tit for Tat' (1969)

14. The Hilltops: 'Sidewalk' (1991)

15. Carter Brothers & Son: 'Old Joe Bone' (1928)

16. Syl Johnson: 'I've Got the Real Thing' (1968)

17. Guitar Slim: 'Guitar Slim' (195418. Jimmy Donley: 'Radio, Jukebox, and T.V.' (1958)

19. The Golden Nugget: 'Gospel Train' (1973)

20. Travis Wammack: 'Rock & Roll Blues' (1958)

21. Henry Green: 'Storm Thru Mississippi' (1951)

22. Wadada Leo Smith and Ed Blackwell: 'Uprising'' (1986)

23. Jim Jackson: 'Old Dog Blue' (1928)

24. The Riviaires: 'Bad Girl' (c. 1965)

25. The Germans: 'Love Sick' (1981)

26. Milton Babbitt' (played by Robert Miller): 'Post-Partitions' (1977)

27. Ted Hawkins: 'Biloxi' (1994)

It's just occurred to me: I suppose Bobbie Gentry's 'Ode to Billie Joe' was too obvious to include? Pity, though, as it's one of my all-time favorites. I note it's contributor Yusef Komunyakaa's favorite Mississippi song. Good man.

Kenneth Goldsmith in The Believer, October 2011

2011-12-29T08:46:00.002Z

I'm a little late getting round to this article, but I think it's something I should make a note of as it's so challenging to our conception of literature. As indeed it's meant to be. The full title of the article in The Believer, including the subtitles, is 'Kenneth Goldsmith (Poet): What Happens when Sense is not Foregrounded as Being of Primary Importance: Some Books Better Thought about than Read: Finnegans Wake[,] The Making of Americans[,] The works of Kenneth Goldsmith'. Dave Mandl writes an introduction about Goldsmith, and then has an email interview with him.

Goldsmith has written books such as Soliloquy, which contains every word he spoke in a week; The Weather, which is a transcript of a radio station's weather reports over a whole year; and Day, which is the text of an issue of The New York Times retyped. You get the idea.

And that's what this is all about: ideas. Goldsmith calls himself a 'conceptual writer', and says he has a 'thinkership' rather than a readership: his books are evidently more or less unreadable, so their value is as thinking tools, or what Goldsmith calls ''pataphysical reference books', an expression that made me immediately think of Alfred Jarry and Oulipo, so I was hardly surprised to find Goldsmith enthusing over Michel Houellebecq enthusing over Georges Perec and Jorge Luis Borges, or to learn that he has established an educational resource called UbuWeb.

Goldsmith also works at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches 'poetic practice and the art of plagiarism'.

And the interview is here.

Roland Camberton: Scamp (1950; repr. 2010)

2011-12-27T15:03:00.005Z

A short time ago I wrote a few words about the recent (re-)publication of Roland Camberton's Scamp, which I've just read, and which I think deserves a comment of more than a few words.

Scamp was a novel with a contemporary story when it was first published in 1950, but today, with its rat-infested Bloomsbury hovels, its journalists with whisky flasks at the hip, its greasy spoon cafés, its politically incorrect talk, its war rationing hangover, its national service, its unwanted pregnancies, and its omnipresent fags and newspapers, it seems to belong to a very distant England indeed. It is a world where Bernard Shaw, James Agate and Cyril Connolly are figures of great importance.

If there'd ever been an English dream, this would be the flipside of it, a society of virtually unemployable losers, many of whom only half-heartedly try to make it as writers, have sex without emotional commitment, and whose idea of social networking is meeting for hours in the pub or the café to philosophize and talk of unrealizable dreams, often scrounging or conning at the same time. Although far less menacing — in fact decidedly cartoonish —the characters aren't so far removed from those of Patrick Hamilton , and the title Scamp indicates an essentially childlike as opposed to sinister nature, although this is in fact a kind of maguffin, being the title of a magazine that's never published.

John Minton's cover is revealing, and Iain Sinclair (in his Introduction 'Man in a Macintosh: Roland Camberton, The Great Invisible in English Fiction') certainly believes that the man depicted is a representation of Camberton (born Henry Cohen). This man is the only clearly drawn human, but focussed to the right of the drawing, behind an unnamed pub. It is perhaps early evening, and in the background are sketchy figures walking together. The man, though (maybe late twenties or early thirties, balding with stubbly chin), is alone and either deep in thought or unhappy. He has a sheaf of papers or a wad of magazines under his arm, and surely the main point here is the weight given to the background: the eye is drawn to the main detail of the man under the pub, who is disappearing bottom right, his head full of what he's leaving: the pub, the people, the streets, the noise, the conversation, the whole fantasy world. Leaving mentally or physically, or perhaps both?

Ivan Ginsberg, the 30-year-old main character in Scamp, is an under-published ex-short story writer who wants to be a literary magazine editor, his only problems being that he has to find the money, contributors and printer to do so. Like many of the other characters, he hasn't grown up, although he begins to do so at the end.

Dianne Elizabeth Dostie Cole, ed.: Diary of Elizabeth Hussey Whittier (1836—1838) (2008)

2011-12-24T11:41:00.014Z

The front cover of this booklet, published by Powwow River Books of Amesbury for the Whittier Home Association, shows a pen drawing of Elizabeth Hussey Whittier by Catherine Wingate Cameron, with an example of her handwriting as the background. The Introduction is by Frances C. Dowd, a former President of the Whittier Home Association who also transcribed the diary with no silent corrections.

The Introduction tells me several things of which I wasn't aware, such as Elizabeth publishing a small volume of poetry, and having several poems published in different magazines; her spending a few months in Pennsylvania with brother 'Greenleaf' (who was working for the Pennsylvania Freeman), which was the only time that she spent away from Amesbury; and that Elizabeth and Whittier returned to Amesbury after his office was burned in an apparent reaction against the anti-slavery movement.

The diary gives very interesting insight into the thoughts of Whittier's sister, into the mind of the Quaker, and to some extent into Whittier's own world, although far too much here is unexplained, and the reader must guess certain things or (far more often) remain ignorant. Footnotes would have been very helpful, as there are many references to abbreviated names, so who are these people? Even if they're not known by the editor, or if their identity is uncertain, then a note to that effect, perhaps with a suggestion, would have helped. For instance, maybe not many readers would know today that Elizabeth's reference to 'Mrs. Hemans' on page 4 is to the popular poet Felicia Hemans, although most people would probably have heard of a boy standing on a burning deck, so a footnote would have been informative. As it is, Hemans is not even mentioned in the Index.

Oh yes, the Index. Strings of words have been keyed in, run through an alphabetical program, and the poem names (in quotes) have floated to the top of the list like cream, leaving a list in perfect alphabetical order. Only, the purpose of an Index is to find the page(s) a reference refers to, but this Index refuses to work that way, unless by sheer coincidence.

Let's take at random, for example, the single Index entries 'Amkanoonaks', 'Mirick, B. L., Mrs.', 'Racoon Mountain', and finally 'Sophronia M' or ''M., Sophronia' if we want to be pedantic and doublecheck. The page numbers given for these entries, respectively, are 16, 26, 16, and 8 (that last number referring to both Sophronia entries). But if we look up these numbers, no such reference is on any of those pages. But like magic, if we add six pages to each of these numbers, they appear on pages 22, 32, 22, and 14 repectively. The numbered pages in the book begin at the page marked '1' (the beginning of Elizabeth's diary, which ends at the page marked '34') and end at the page marked '40', which is the final page of the Index. Logically, there should, in an Index that subtracts six pages, be no number above 28. But to take one example, there are four references to 'Amesbury', one of which is to page 29, which is a self-reference to the appearance of the town in the Index itself. So you just add six? Well, not quite: 'Campbell' should be on page 36, in other words page 40, but it's not there: we don't live in a perfect world, but this error could have been easily checked before publication.

I don't intend my comments to be taken very seriously, and I realize that the wonderful work for the Whittier Home Association is voluntary and an excellent job has been done transcribing what doesn't look very easy-to-read handwriting, but all the same an editor normally says a few words about the actual editing of a work, although there's nothing here. I have a large number of questions about the people alluded to in Elizabeth's diary, but unfortunately I don't have any answers.

Kristin Bierfelt: The North Shore Literary Trail (2007)

2011-12-22T17:42:00.004Z

Kristin Bierfelt's title The North Shore Literary Trail: From Bradstreet's Andover to Hawthorne's Salem only gives the briefest indication of the contents of this fascinating book, and although it only covers a small geographical area, it contains a large number of writers who have lived in this part of Massachusetts.

Over fifty writers are mentioned in eighteen towns or villages, and a number of posts I've made this year relate to graves, statues, houses, etc, discovered solely as a result of reading this book. Not only was I led to features of which I was previously unaware concerning famous writers, but I was also informed of writers of whom I hadn't heard, such as Alonzo Lewis, Vincent Ferrini, Harriet Prescott Spofford, John Marquand, Lucy Larcom, etc.

Although the subject of the book is literature, it's fortunate that the author stretches the term to a large extent at times because I don't know where else I'd have heard of Roger Babson's eccentric boulder carvings in Dogtown near Gloucester (except perhaps in Anita Diamant's novel The Last Days of Dogtown (2005)), or the fact that the The Scaffold's song 'Lily the Pink' alludes to Lynn resident Lydia Estes Pinkham's Vegetable Compound ('Medicinal Compound' in the song): a strongly alcoholic concoction said to have worked wonders for menstrual pains and menopausal problems that sold very well during the Prohibition years.*

This book is a must for anyone traveling in north-east Massachusetts who is even remotely interested in literature.

*There is a Lydia Pinkham Memorial Clinic in Salem, built by Pinkham's daughter in 1922, almost forty years after her mother's death.

John 'Ben' Pickard: Whittier and His Elizabeths (2007)

2011-12-22T17:37:00.000Z

The title of this booklet — being a paper Pickard read at the Newburyport Literary Festival in April 2007 — appears to have been inspired by Whittier's poem 'The Two Elizabeths', which the poet read when Elizabeth Fry's statue was unveiled in Providence, Rhode Island. (The other Elizabeth was St Elizabeth of Hungary.)

The purpose of Pickard's paper is to discuss four Elizabeths in Whittier's life. I already mentioned his sister Elizabeth Hussey Whittier and his niece Lizzie (Pickard's grandmother, on whom he concentrates in particular) in my last post, but not his romantic attachments to the Quakers Elizabeth Lloyd Howell and Elizabeth Neall.

The only woman Whittier ever discussed marriage with was Elizabeth Howell, whom he thought the most beautiful woman he'd ever met. Whittier had met Howell when he was staying in Philadelphia. She had an interest in art and poetry and like Whittier was an abolitionist. Their friendship blossomed, but Whittier blew cold, quite possibly because he wasn't in a financially secure position for marriage, as it was only with Snow-Bound in the 1860s that he became so, by which time he was in his fifties. So Howell married someone else in 1853, although she became a widow a few years later, which was a cue for their relationship to florish again, although Howell's criticism of what she saw as the limited culture of Quakerism and her espousal of Episcopalianism led to the end of the romance.

Elizabeth Neall too was from Philadelphia, and her father Daniel had been tarred and feathered for his anti-slavery stance. She strongly embraced women's independence, and visited Europe as an anti-slavery delegate. Whittier wrote the poem 'To a Friend on Her Return from Europe' for her, but never spoke of love to her, and she too married someone else. There's an odd thing about writers and virginity in Massachusetts, and one thinks of Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, etc.

Unfortunately a few typos missed the editing process: for example, the front page title conflicts with the title-page's rather odd 'Whittier as a Local Poet', Whittier is called 'reknown New England poet', and Pickard is described as Whittier's 'great-grand-newphew'.

John 'Ben' Pickard: A House Becomes a Home: The Women of the Amesbury Whittier House (2007)

2011-12-22T17:32:00.002Z

John 'Ben' Pickard, the author of this booklet, is the great-grand-nephew of John Greenleaf Whittier. The background on the cover is a photo of the wallpaper from the east attic of the Amesbury Whittier house.

Written for a talk which took place five years before the publication of Whittier and His Elizabeths and also published in the same year (2007) by the Whittier Home Association, this booklet (along with the other) is interesting in that it approaches John Greenleaf Whittier's life from a feminist point of view, foregrounding the women behind the poet rather than the poet himself. It is also appropriate in that Whittier himself was a feminist, although perhaps more in theory than in practice.

Whittier (then aged 29) moved with his family to Amesbury, Massachusetts in 1836, leaving the home of his birth at the farm in East Haverill (pronounced 'HAY-vrill') which is about eight miles away and had been in the family since it was built in 1688: after the death of their father and uncle who had kept the farm, neither Whittier nor his brother Franklin wanted to be farmers, and the women of the household were not suited to the work.

These women were the mother Abigail Hussey Whittier, the single aunt Mercy Hussey, and the younger sister, Elizabeth Hussey Whittier. Pickard describes the first two women as 'domestic caretakers' doing the cooking, cleaning, and making the clothes for the male of the family, the man who would never marry and would remain at the house until 1876, when he joined his Johnson cousins in Danvers, Massachusetts.

Mercy died in 1846. Elizabeth Hussey Whittier was a companion to the poet for many years, although her health suffered a great deal in the 1850s, and it was also a huge loss to him when his mother died in 1857.

The following year Franklin's 13-year-old daughter — also named Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, but generally referred to as Lizzie — joined the household initially as a schoolgirl, although her aunt's ailing condition in the early 1860s meant that Lizzie increasingly took on the household tasks, also becoming companion and secretary to Whittier. Elizabeth died in 1864, and Lizzie's marriage to Samuel Thomas Pickard (later Whittier's biographer) in 1876 necessitated Whittier's move to Danvers. He died in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire in 1892 at the age of 85, leaving much of his estate — including the house — to Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Hussey Pickard, who had been with him for several of his final weeks.

Although Ben Pickard's booklet stresses the vital importance of women in the Whittier household (and indeed by extension in many other 19th century households) it is also the story of the physical evolution of the house, the alterations it underwent through the decades, and the story of late 19th century political disagreements between the Whittier Home Association and the Elizabeth Whittier Club.

Maylis de Kerangal: Naissance d'un pont (2010)

2011-12-22T08:35:00.003Z

Naissance d'un pont (lit. 'Birth of a Bridge') is on the surface about just that: the building of a bridge between the fictional Californian towns Coca and Edgefront. The dream of the Dubai-obsessed local mayor, the building of the bridge will in less than a year directly involve attempted sabotage (linked with a death), strong violence, strike action, accidental death, delay due to bird behavior, etc; indirectly, the effects are far more.

Maylis de Kerangal is interested in 'porosité', or porousness, the way things seep through to other things, which she shows not only in her characters (the resemblance between the apparent opposites Jacob and Diderot, for example) but in the words she uses: the technical language of the world of engineering merges seamlessly into the colloquial, and the spoken word — even in conversation — is not marked by punctuation but allowed to join in the narrative flow. And this flow sometimes goes on and on, with the use of very long sentences. So it's not surprising to learn that she was impressed by Mathias Énard's Zone, a novel consisting of only one sentence.

What is perhaps surprising, though, is that there is much humor. This can come in the form of the narrator's mocking repetition, as in 'John Johnson, known as the Boa'; it can come in the deadpan but chilling description of the way Soren previously walked out on his girlfriend: 'hardly has the bear entered the appartment than he turns the key in the lock with a feverish hand, shuts the door on the bear and the girl', which is retributively and laconically recalled in the way Soren (now known to be dead but the reason originally unclear) meets his end in the forest in Edgefront: 'There is a bear missing from the town zoo'; or it can come in an almost slapstick manner, as when Shakira joins the cranedriver Sanche — who is armed with a liter of Jack Daniel's, dry cakes and a CD player — in his cabin fifty feet up in the air for cramped sex.

Some of the names are playful too, as in the architect Ralph Waldo, or the materialistic building site boss Georges Diderot, or in the naturalness of Katherine Thoreau.

The bridge is where outsiders of many kinds meet, where history joins the present and the future, where a modern itinerant Lone Ranger becomes a kind of spaghetti western actor in the multicultural internet generation. One of the most interesting books I've read this year.

Occupy Boston, Dewey Square Tent City, Massachusetts

2011-12-17T13:49:00.000Z

Before we left Boston, Massachusetts, late October, this was the scene in Dewey Square. $45,000 in donations had been received, a library full of books given, and a giant Gandhi statue had been loaned to the group. There was a large quantity of free food, and the atmosphere was very positive and very friendly. I'll let the images speak for themselves.

Goodbye once more Boston.

The Helen Keller Fountain, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Literary New England #23

2011-12-17T13:11:00.003Z

Down a small pathway off Brattle Street in Cambridge is the Helen Keller fountain with a small lion with water coming from its mouth. Keller explains the revelation that Anne Sullivan brought to her in The Story of My Life (1924).

On the brick wall at each side of the fountain is a plaque, one of which is in Braille.

The other is in English:

'IN MEMORY OF

ANNE SULLIVAN

TEACHER EXTRAORDINARY — WHO,

BEGINNING WITH THE WORD WATER

OPENED TO THE GIRL HELEN KELLER

THE WORLD OF SIGHT AND SOUND

THROUGH TOUCH

BELOVED COMPANION THROUGH

RADCLIFFE COLLEGE

1900 — 1904'

Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts: Literary New England #22

2011-12-17T12:49:00.003Z

Opened in 1848, Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain to some extent rivals Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts in terms of undulating grounds, twisting paths and lush vegetation. The number of writers is far less, although there are several of note.

The marker that includes Anne Sexton (1928—74).

And the inscription on the tomb.

Karl Heinzen's impressive monument stands on a hillock above other graves.

The bust.

The marker, in the upper case, of the man I'll spell in the lower case: e. e. cummings (1894—1964).

He is buried in the Clarkes' lot, on his maternal side.

Finally, the jagged grave of Eugene O'Neill (1888—1953) hides in the bushes.

On the top is a small cairn with a number of pens.

Thornton W. Burgess in Sandwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts: Literary New England #21

2011-12-17T12:12:00.003Z

Although he spent most of his life in or near Springfield, Massachusetts (latterly in Hampden, where his former home is now the Laughing Brook Wildlife Sanctuary), the children's writer and conservationist Thornton W. Burgess (1874—1965) saw his birthplace in Sandwich, Cape Cod as his spiritual home: it is where his deep concern for wildlife was born.

The house was built in 1746, and Burgess was a direct descendant of Thomas Burgess, one of the first settlers in the town in 1637.

The museum is inside the Deacon Eldred House, and also serves as the Sandwich Chamber of Commerce Visitor Information Center. We couldn't see inside because it had just come to the end of the season.

A welcome sign at the side of the door gives an indication of a few of Burgess's many animal characters, such as Peter Rabbit, Reddy Fox, and Sammy Jay depicted here.

And unsurprisngly, representations of animals are present outside, such as this rabbit in the sage.

Or this metal squirrel.

Or this plaque of rabbits on the roof. The quotation 'The finest gift is a portion of thyself' is from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

'A TUSSIE-MUSSIE GARDEN

OUR HERB GARDEN IS A 50' CIRCULAR GARDEN

DESIGNED TO REPRESENT A TUSSIE-MUSSIE,

A SMALL NOSEGAY OF FLOWERS AND HERBS

TIED WITH A RIBBON.

THE GARDEN IS DIVIDED INTO AREAS OF

FRAGRANT, CULINARY, MEDICINAL AND DYEING HERBS.

THE OPPOSITE END OF OUR GARDEN OFFERS A

"DIFFERENT VIEW" AND TWO SPECIAL GARDENS.

CREATED FOR THE THORNTON BURGESS MUSEUM

BY WILLIAM & BARBARA SOLLER'

I couldn't work it out, but then I didn't expect to.

Ditto the sundial.

Views of the back and side elevations.

There is also a 'small touch and smell' herb garden.

At the back of the house is Shawme pond, and a few yards further down is Dexter's Grist Mill, which was first operated in about 1654. It was restored in 1961.

Sarah Orne Jewett in South Berwick, Maine: Literary New England #20

2011-12-15T19:02:00.003Z

Tilly Haggens emigrated to the USA from Ireland about 1740 and bought an area of land in South Berwick, Maine. This house, which is at the junction of the present Main Street and Portland Street, was built on the land by Tilly's son John, who lived here with his family until about 1819.

Captain Theodore F. Jewett was a merchant and a ship owner who probably originally rented the house here when he moved his family from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and didn't buy it until 1839. The captain's son, Dr Theodore Herman Jewett, moved here in 1848 with his wife Caroline and their baby daughter Mary. The following year, Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born. Many years later, after Sarah had moved back into the house, she used to write in front of the window above the door, where she could see the events in the center of the town. Umm.

The present entrance to the house museum, which is owned by Historic New England, which unfortunately doesn't allow photography inside.

In 1854 a house was built next door to Sarah Orne's birthplace and the doctor — who was practising in and around the town — moved his family here, and a short time later a third daughter, Caroline Augusta, was born. Her father used to take Sarah on his rounds, which is how she learned a great deal about the local color which fed her short stories and novels; for instance, in 1884 she wrote A Country Doctor.

Sarah's uncle William died in 1887 and Sarah and Mary inherited the house, which they moved back into with their mother, according to Historic New England. So where does Annie Fields fit into the picture? Annie's husband James T. Fields died in 1881, after which Sarah Orne Jewett is said by reliable sources to have been in a long 'Boston marriage' with her.

Caroline Augusta had married Edwin Eastman, and they moved into the house next door, now known as the Jewett-Eastman House, which has been the town library since 1970.

Jewett's tomb in South Berwick cemetery:

'To the dear memory

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

Daughter of Doctor Theodore H.

and Caroline F. Jewett

Born the third of September

1849

Died the twenty fourth of June

1909

Until the day break

and the shadows flee away'

Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: New England Tour #19

2011-12-15T18:39:00.001Z

Herman Melville (1819—91) married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, and in 1950 moved with his family to a farm in Pittsfield in the Berkshires, west Massachusetts, a town he was familar with through his uncle Thomas Melvill. He called it Arrowhead. He had had success with his novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which was very much inspired by his three-month stay on the Marquesas Islands after deserting the whaler Acushnet, on which he'd spent eighteen months in the early 1840s.

Melville began a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he'd met on Monument Mountain* and who lived a few miles away in Lenox. Melville spent his most productive writing years at Arrowhead. Here he wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), 'Bartleby the Scrivener' (1853), 'Benito Cereno' (1855), and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). And of course Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), which he dedicated to Hawthorne. He told his friend Evert A. Duyckinck in December 1850 that life in the country was like being at sea, and that he felt his writing room was a ship's cabin. Arriving very shortly after the season, I was unable to see and photograph his desk.

Unfortunately, Melville's work at Pittsfield was unsuccessful and The Confidence-Man was his last novel. The family returned to New York in 1863. Throughout his life his writings only brought him $10,000. Now, of course, he is recognized as a great writer, and Moby-Dick is generally thought of as one of the greatest American novels.

*William Cullen Bryant wrote the poem 'Monument Mountain' about the legend of the name, concerning the love of an Indian maid for her cousin, which disgusted her elders because they considered it incestuous. She retreated into herself, shunned company and threw herself to her death from the rocks. They buried her on the southern slope and left a simple monument: a cairn to which anyone passing would silently add.

Famously, on 5 August 1850 a group of literary people went for a picnic on Monument Mountain, among them Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James T. Fields, Annie Fields, and Evert A. Duyckinck. After climbing to the top, there was a reading of Bryant's poem, they had lunch in the rocks, and they drank a great deal. The event is commemorated every year by a climb up the mountain.

Mary Dutton: Thorpe (1967)

2011-12-14T17:42:00.003Z

There are several reasons why I didn't give up on this book: sheer determination, the enticing obscurity of it, and endearing fact (to me as least) that this is one of those rare animals — an only published novel. It was also something of a discovery, being a Southern book (set in Arkansas, where Dutton was born) of which I was previously unaware.

The single novel element, plus the racial issue and the (eponymous) young female protagonist with a father of great integrity, almost inevitably lead to comparisons with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and memories of Scout and Atticus Finch, so it's hardly surprising to read the front page of the dust jacket announcing 'A Story of Innocence and Terror...As memorable as TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD'.

However, although this book is undoubtedly well written, Dutton's novel just doesn't merit any other comparison with Mockingbird: the pace is too slow, the power isn't there, and — crucially — I had (at least until the end) severe problems deciding if race was the main issue, or just family difficulties. It seems to lose its path for a very large number of pages.

The blurb on the rear flap quotes Dutton: 'I think what I was trying to say is that a "little bit" of evil cannot be isolated. It grows and touches, like the rain, both the just and the unjust — those who ignore it and those who are unaware of its existence.' Er, certainly it is clear that racism in the Jim Crow South of the mid-thirties was unavoidable, and that there was much social and often economic pressure for people to at least go through the motions of supporting the Ku Klux Klan. Not too sure about that meteorological analogy though.

On a lighter note, the dog called 'Dammit' is a nice touch, and reminds me of the euphemistically-named dog 'Cough' in Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger.

The rear cover tells me that Mary Dutton was born in El Dorado, was living in Borger, Texas at the time of publication, and was a school teacher. I'm not too sure why she published nothing else: as I have a book club edition, and as there are a number of copies of this book for sale online, the suggestion is that it was popular enough. But then, if she took ten years over this, how many would she take to complete the usually difficult second one?

Gilbert Wakefield in Nottingham, England

2011-12-14T17:37:00.001Z

'ON THIS SITE STOOD THE OLD

RECTORY IN WHICH WAS BORN

GILBERT WAKEFIELD

THEOLOGIAN & SCHOLAR

FEB. 22ND 1756.

DIED AT HACKNEY, SEP. 9TH 1801.'

Gilbert Wakefield's plaque is a Holbrook Bequest one and is attached to a wall belonging to St Nicholas's Church, where his father George was rector.

Gilbert left the Church of England to become a Unitarian. He was imprisoned for two years in Dorchester for writing a pamphlet in favor of the French Revolution. In 1798 he also published a a very critical reply to the Bishop of Llandaff's call for the raising of taxes.

Clara Dupont-Monod: La Passion Selon Juette: Roman (2007)

2011-12-13T18:25:00.000Z

This novel is inspired by the true story of Juette, born in the small town of Huy, now in Belgium, in 1158. The original story of her life was written in Latin by her friend Hugues de Floreffe, a member of a dissenting religious order.

Clara Dupont-Monod's story is of a young adolescent Juette, groomed by her parents not to develop independent ideas, to sew well in preparation for imminent marriage, to say "Yes, I want him" at the wedding ceremony without understanding its meaning, groomed to suffer the pain, humiliation and fear the same night (and many following nights) of an act that is scarcely distinguishable from rape from a 21st century viewpoint. Juette bears a child she rejects, but she is fortunate in that her anonymous husband dies when she is only eighteen. Her father wants to marry Juette to another potential rapist, but totally against the conventions of the day she rebels.

La Passion selon Juette is made up of passages told by Juette between usually shorter ones by Hugues, who is strongly impressed by the girl who, like him, detests the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the Catholic bishop, the wealth and power of the Church.

Juette sinks all the money inherited from her husband into a leper colony, where she goes to live with five other women.

She has visions, is sought out by her many supporters, and even seen as a saint. She is of course regarded as a heretic by the Catholic Church, and although many dissenters are burned at the stake, Juette survives, although Hugues finishes the story.

This is a feminist novel full of burning hatred for patriarchal medieval society, but which it also succeeds in being is a kind of love story between a devoutly religious man and woman.

Dany Boon's Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis/Welcome to the Sticks (2008)

2011-12-13T18:21:00.002Z

A French comedy in which much of the humor is based on verbal misunderstandings is bound to lose something in translation, as is the case with this untranslatable title, which in French refers to (the language of or) the people from the north (mainly in the northern half of the Pas-de-Calais département), the Ch'tis (or Chtimis), essentially so called because they tend to pronounce words or syllables beginning with an 's' as 'ch' (or 'sh' to an English ear).

But there is also a great deal of humor of situation, and Dany Boon makes the most of this in a movie set largely in his home territory, which just happens to be a huge recordbreaker as far as French movies in France go.

Post office manager Philippe Abrams (Kad Mérad) works in Provence (some scenes being set in Salon-de-Provence), but his attempts to relocate to the Côte d'Azur by passing off as a handicapped person misfire and he is punished by being sent off to Bergues in the north, leaving behind his wife Julie (Zoe Félix) and their young son.

There are several references to other movies: before leaving, in a scene which recalls Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Philippe consults his wife's great-uncle, who in semi-darkness informs him that temperatures in the north can reach below 60; on his fearful arrival in Bergues, buildings take on the distorted nature of those in some German Expressionist movies (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari?); and the most obvious homage is to Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête, with its cycling postman, especially when he accepts drinks from the people he delivers mail to.

Cutting to the quick, Philippe's anticipations of the cold north disappear like morning frost as he is warmly accepted into Ch'ti society. There may initially be a few blips when he fears Antoine (Dany Boon) is a mad transvestite, or when he has to cope with the smell of the local maroilles cheese, or eating outside at 'Friterie "Momo"', but he soon adapts to life in the north to the extent that he even forgets it's the weekend, and the driving distance between Bergues and Provence shrinks by about 400 kilometers to make the round trip feasible, but hey, this is the movies, isn't it?

I thoroughly enjoyed thish one, although I guesh it ish not sho eashy if you have to conshentrate on shubtitlsh, ash it musht be sho frushtrating. Sherioushly, ish shuper!

One bitch on subtitling: 'connasse' = 'bitch'? Oh yeah? If you want to pass a certain certification maybe, but...

Edna St Vincent Millay in Ring's Island, Salisbury, Massachusetts: Literary New England #18

2011-12-13T18:13:00.001Z

A childhood home of Edna St Vincent Millay (1892—1950) at the Jonathan Dole House (built 1680), 5 Third Street, Ring's Island, Salisbury, which is on the northern shore of the Merrimack River facing Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Millay (Edna St Vincent), Salisbury (MA), Amesbury, Ring's Island, Massachusetts, Newburyport.

Delphine de Vigan: Les Heures souterraines (2009)

2011-12-09T18:44:00.002Z

'At thirty she survived the death of her husband.

She's now forty and a bastard in a three-piece suit is systematically destroying her.'

That neatly sums up most of Les Heures souterraines, in which the widow Mathilde — whose husband died ten years earlier when their car hit a tree as they were on their way to a hotel in Honfleur — is losing both her job and her existential integrity. In a novel that reminds us of Amélie Nothomb's Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling) — which of course is a reference to existentialist Kierkegaard's book — Mathilde, a victim of pathological revenge, is slowly stripped of the duties of her €3000-a-month post, reduced to a tiny room nicknamed 'the shed', or 'the shithouse' because it's next door to the sounds and smells of the men's room, and with no access to the firm's intranet or even any work to do.

Furthermore, when toward the end she tries to communicate with the psychotic Jacques Pelletier (whose assistant she has officially been but who for weeks has not spoken to her), her completely reasonable and calmly stated complaint about her catch-22 situation is distorted by her torturer into one of many gross insults that she simply hasn't made.

Perhaps inevitably, she resigns: insanity would probably have been the only alternative. Ignoring the fact that others in Mathilde's office shun her too — after all, they are only doing so out of fear of Pelletier — the source of the protagonist's alienation only stems from one source, and not from several sources as in Nothomb's novel and Kafka's The Trail. Shouldn't the company be aware that he has a behaviorial problem? To mention just a few indications of this:

He complains that his hotel carpet is dirty, whereas the vacuum cleaner has only been swept against the pile; he sends back his plate in a restaurant because the pattern on it is too phallic for him; he brings the receptionist up to his room in the middle of the night because he can't, among the 120 available channels, find CNN; he can't stand waiting in traffic jams so starts yelling insults at his GPS. The list doesn't end there by any means.

But I've left out a major (or in a sense very minor) theme in the novel: the relationship between Mathilde and Thibault.

Mathilde travels to work in Le Vert de Maisons via the métro and the RER, and the narrator underlines her daily acquaintance with this underworld:

'She knew by heart the corridors, the escalators, the short cuts, this subterranean world woven like a web into the depths of the town.'

Thibault both travels and works on the surface of Paris, being a doctor driving to 'emergency' situations, although many of them aren't emergencies, and he knows the streets of Paris and the inhabitants' assumed and real illnesses as well as Mathilde knows the alienation of the underground. Ten years after the death of her husband, Mathilde's three children can't fill the hole in her life, and nor can she the hole in theirs, and surely paying that 'voyante' over in the 16th arrondissement €150 euros just to be told her life will change on 20 May was a sheer waste of money?

Apart from the backstories, the action in Les Heures souterraines takes place on 20 May, when Matilde resigns after eight years, and when Thibault (who has finished with a woman he loves but who is incapable of loving him) is forced by traffic conditions to abandon his car for the night and take the métro.

They are now aware of each other, and both crave heterosexual warmth. Across strapotins, Thibault studies Mathilde and sees what he thinks is a similar mind, and wants to talk to her. But he doesn't say a word. She disappears into her alienated world, and he into his.

Delphine de Vigan is to be congratulated for giving this really absorbing psychological study a much more realistic (and therefore extremely uncommercial) ending than it could have had.

Marguerite Duras: L'Amante Anglaise (1967)

2011-12-09T18:35:00.002Z

The title L'Amante Anglaise (literally 'The (female) English Lover') is intriguing, as there is no such person in the book. There are, though, a few refererences in the novel to the near-homonymic term 'La Mente Anglaise' ('English Mint'), and even (more indirectly) to 'La Mente en glaise' ('glaise' being a clayey kind of substance), and although that might confuse things it gives an idea of the playfulness of the title.

To add to the confusion, this novel (which is in fact written in the form of a play allowing several viewpoints on one subject) was, er, originally a play. And this play was based on true events that took place in 1949, when pieces of a dead body (apart from the head) were found in various goods train wagons and shortly after linked to one viaduct that all the trains had passed under.

L'Amante Anglaise is in three parts. In the first section an unnamed interviewer speaks to Robert Lamy; in the second the interviewer speaks to Pierre Lannes, the husband of Claire Lannes; and in the third the interviewer speaks to Claire herself.

Lamy is the patron of 'Le Balto' café in Viorne (the place where the body parts were disposed of) and fills in some factual details about an audiotape that was recorded in his café several days after the murder, when the Lannes were present with Lamy, as was Italian immigrant Alphonso, and two strangers, one of whom is an undercover policeman. At the end of the tape the policeman arrests Claire for the murder of her deaf and dumb cousin Marie-Thérèse Bousquer. Marie-Thérèse occasionally had sex with Alphonso, who was probably in love with Claire, and he was one of the few people Claire related to. The interviewer thinks the crime is more complicated than it seems to be, is trying to understand Claire, and can't find a motive for the murder.

The second section is the interviewer questioning Pierre. Factually this is incorrect as Claire had in reality killed him, but Duras changed this because she thought he should be allowed to have his say.

Finally, the prison interview with Claire at first reveals a playful but apparently rational woman who won't reveal why she's killed her cousin, nor where she's put her head. The interviewer's enthusiastic voice begins to disappear as it is revealed, with chilling clarity, that Claire is in fact hopelessly insane.

David Foenkinos: La Délicatesse (2009)

2011-12-07T17:31:00.001Z

There are many perceptive observations in this book. Foenkinos's main character is a woman, and certainly his feminism is evident — the way, for example, he dissects (and as a result excoriates) the transparent lust-driven subterfuges of Nathalie's boss Charles, or the way in which he delineates her grief. And the repercussions of François's death are seen at work not only as a catalyst in Charles's inappropriate moves toward Nathalie, but also in the shock of the florist who drove the crash van, and even in her unsatisfied customer who didn't see his floral marriage proposal delivered, this burgeoning love of course serving as a counterpoint to the brutally ended marriage. Violence can be inadvertent and ironic, as in the staff, out of respect, not touching Nathalie's desk during her three months' absence, but forgetting that the calendar still marks the day before tragedy struck, when François was still alive.

At the center of the novel is Nathalie's coming alive again in her growing love for the rather odd Markus, a Swede who isn't ugly but certainly not handsome, with a strange dress sense and slightly eccentric behaviour. But he has an unexpected — and highly unlikely — effect on Nathalie: this man has no edge, and his inventive humor makes him fun to be with.

Foenkinos is noted for his novels of love interest and his humor, but the serious and the playful perhaps don't gel too happily here, and there are a number of infelicities, mainly in the gimmicks: rather silly footnotes, a brief theater scene that is relevant but seems incongruous, chapters of lists (football matches, people's zodiac signs, maxims by Cioran (a Foenkinos favorite), a quotation from Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, parts of Alain Souchon's 'L'Amour en fuite' (two chapters), songs by John Lennon (another Foenkinos favorite), definitions of délicat from Larousse, etc).

A curate's egg.

Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège (1945)

2011-12-06T18:17:00.000Z

Emmanuel Bove was born in 1898 and died at the age of 47 in 1945 following a long infectious illness. He published a number of novels and several selections of short stories, was praised by Colette, Samuel Beckett and Rainer Maria Rilke, but in spite of some re-publication in the 1980s remains relatively unknown even in France.

Bove refused to have any books published in occupied France, wanted to meet with de Gaulle in England, but instead ended up in Algeria. There are a few not entirely different links between Bove and the protagonist Joseph Bridet in this novel.

Le Piège (lit. 'The Trap, but not translated) (1945) plunges the reader into a Kafkaesque nightmare world of occupied France where misunderstanding, paranoia, surveillance, and purposeless random executions are the order of the day, where no one can be trusted and the people don't know what is happening, nor why.

In Lyons, Bridet wants to leave for England but doesn't know how to, so goes to see his friend Basson in Vichy, who's an attaché with the general management of the national police. He doesn't, of course, tell him that he wants to go to England, but from Basson onwards it's all downhill, waiting for various Vichy officials who convey nothing to him other than their suspicion of him, and he knows he's in trouble.

Yolande is his naive wife with almost unbelievable confidence in the legal process, so she's certain that nothing can happen to Bridet as he hasn't done anything wrong; however, in her naivety she unwittingly makes things worse for him. On reaching Paris with a futile plan to go for England, he's arrested, communist tracts planted on him, then he's imprisoned and eventually executed.

I'm not at all certain why Bove has fallen out of favor with the reading public, although perhaps his 'subtle' and 'latent' misogyny that Alain Clerval finds — and which he speaks about in his Aferword in the 1986 Gallimard republication — is a contributory factor.

L. S. Lowry in Nottingham, England

2011-12-05T18:48:00.002Z

The exhibition of L. S. Lowry's work at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside, the University of Nottingham's Public Arts Centre & Museum (which ends 5 February 2012) provides an excellent antidote to anyone's notion (many years' ago trumpeted by a fatuous pop song) that Lowry was a painter of whimsical scenes in the Manchester area.

In fact the cover above adverting the event, although perhaps slightly disturbing in itself as the subject (quite possibly a self-portrait), is nothing like as disturbing as some of the paintings. An excellent counterpoint to this portait is Head of a Man (1938), which depicts a very similar although older man in a very different way: the neat jacket, tie and pinned collar are replaced by a rather untidy looking coat and scarf, the neat hair has become a little dishevelled, and the cleanshaven appearance by a moustache and stubble.

Much more importantly, the mélange of wide-eyed innocence and a face staring into a possible future void becomes not just a world-weary stare into presentday nothingness, the pronounced red of the eyes and the nose and the lines and the frown and tauter lips are not just an expression of the ravages of time and a knowledge that our lot in life has to be accepted: this is a detailed depiction of existential anguish. Lowry had for some years looked after his difficult hypochondriacal mother, and the portrait was made the year before she died in 1939, when Lowry reached a crisis point.

But, as the interprepretation notes make clear at the sides of many of the paintings (and pencil sketches in another room in the exhibition), a great number of his paintings from the 1920s through the 1950s express mental anguish. When we look at Lowry's works, we are very often looking at works of alienation, made by an outsider representing the world of the outsider. Here we have itimations of death, seen with the cemetery in the foreground or background, his mother's empty bed, or more metaphorically as a black ship moving toward the viewer. Here we have a tableau of people crippled in many ways, Breughel-like figures, the unemployed, houses isolated by water, landscapes with no sign of life, almost surreal shapes, paintings of horizon and sea or the countryside with no suggestion of human life.

And the human life Lowry shows, those smoky factory scenes with active figures in the foreground, his famous 'matchstickmen'? How much human warmth and companionship do we see? Like everyone, Lowry said many contradictory things, but he spoke of automatons, people rushing with intent, purpose, but that no one is free.

No. Throughout this exhibition — again and again — I saw the main subject of L. S. Lowry's canvases as not so much external to himself as repesentational of the prison of his mind. Thoroughly recommended. And admission is free.

Susan Cheever: American Bloomsbury (2006)

2011-12-05T18:44:00.002Z

Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (New York: Simon & Schuster (2006)) gives the impression of a designed-for-Googling title, cramming in the important members of the writing set in Concord, Massachusetts. This book is not a critical analysis of the authors' works — that would be a whistlestop tour in just 200 pages — but it does manage to bring the main characters of a literary phenomenon to life very well.

The Concord phenomenon would not have been possible without the financial support of Emerson, who — thanks to the money he inherited from his first wife Ellen Tucker — provided assistance to the writers, as one of the many blunt chapter titles, 'Emerson Pays for Everything', makes quite clear.

This book is essentially a popular representation of a highly talented literary community concentrated in a very small area. It isn't a work of original research and relies, apart from some speculation, entirely on secondary sources. As the chapter title already mentioned suggests, this is also slightly sensationalized. And he words 'American Bloomsbury' of course suggest not just a concentration of great talent in a small area, but also bed-hopping, sex triangles, homosexuality, free thinking, etc.

How does that square with the reality of Concord? Was it a 19th century Bloomsbury, or is the title just a publisher's exaggeration? Apart from the concentration of talent, are there any other similarities to Bloomsbury? Yes and no. In both communities, we have the freshness of new ideas, the spirit of adventure, the break with the past, etc. But to suggest that Concord was a hotbed of wild sex — and not only the word 'Bloomsbury' does that, but also Cheever's titillating chapter titles 'Sex' and 'Margaret Fuller, the Sexy Muse' — is going way too far. The first sentence of 'Sex' points out that the 'more liberal ways' of the previous century were giving way to the 'uptight views' of the mid-nineteenth century, and the chapter itself — scarcely more than two pages in length — only speaks of one of the five writers in relation to sex outside marriage, and that's to speak of Hawthorne's fictional Hester Prynne!

Desire is abundant though: Lousia May Alcott falls first for natural man Thoreau, then philosopher Emerson; Thoreau falls for, well, several women; and Cheever's 'Sexy Muse' Fuller (incidentally the only one of the five not to be buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but Mount Auburn) gets both Hawthorne and Emerson's lusting after her. But through all this, there's not a scrap of proof any of the five heros spent any of their 'Transcendental Wild Oats', as Louisa humorously puts it, on any of their objects of desire.

If Margaret Fuller was a tantalizer, so is Susan Cheever. This is still well worth a read though — just don't be conned by the title.

Raymond Queneau: Exercices de style (1947)

2011-12-05T18:34:00.001Z

Queneau's Exercices de style first takes place on a former 'S' line bus in Paris, where there's a man of about 26 with a long neck wearing a soft hat with a long ribbon. Each time someone passes, the man next to him bumps into him, and the young man complains to the second about this. As soon as there's a spare seat, he takes it. Later, the narrator sees the same young man in an animated conversation with a friend, who advises him to do up the top button of his overcoat.

And that's the full story. But the narrator tells the same one over and over again, 99 times in total. Only, there's a variation each time: the story is told in litotes, metaphorically, backwards, using surprises, negations, anagrams, onomatopeas, alexandrines, apocopation, aphesis, apostrophe, casually, clumsily, negatively, telegraphically, as a sonnet, as an ode, lipogram, etc.

This is all very clever, but like some other Oupipean experiments the novelty tends to wear off very quickly, and I don't really think this bears sustained reading. Near the end, there's a page of interjections which are just given out at random, and the overriding feeling I'd got long before that was just to give up reading as the point had been made so often before — it tries too hard, and becomes a victim of its own cleverness.

Louisa May Alcott: A Long Fatal Love Chase (1995)

2011-12-05T18:28:00.001Z

In 1865 Louisa May Alcott went to Europe, traveling as a paid companion to Anna Weld, who was sickly and from a monied Boston family. Louisa tired of Anna's constant demands and left her employment to travel alone, although toward the end she spent two weeks with Ladislas Wisniewski, later basing the character Laurie in Little Women on him.

On her return to the USA, Alcott was not surprised to find the family's financial situation in its usual poor state, so tried to get pulp publisher James R. Elliott to accept this novel that she wrote, in two months, to Elliott's structural design. However, Elliott said he thought it too long and too sensational, so Alcott shelved it. It was not published until over a century later.

In A Long Fatal Love Chase the main character Rosamund Vivian, in the beginning living with her abusive grandfather, is very soon enticed away by the exciting Philip Tempest, who turns out to be even worse than her grandfather, and soon after her marriage to him she discovers that this frightening man is already married. No matter where she runs — and her escape takes in several different countries — Tempest, or his servant Baptiste, finds her. The book has Elliott's recommended number of twenty-four similar length chapters, there is the usual 'cliffhanger' effect at the end of most of them enticing the reader to continue, the book does betray the fact that it was swiftly written, but this is not just what we might call writing by numbers. There is a feminist strength in it: there is criticism of men's abuse of power, a female protagonist who controls most of the action, and although there's another male who's in love with her and gets her out of a few tricky spots, he's also effectively neutered by his unswerving devotion to a monastic order.

It's a very quick read, but it's not at all as trashy as it might sound on the surface. Plus, it's of obvious historical interest in Alcott's oeuvre.

E. B. White: The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)

2011-12-05T18:23:00.002Z

The rear inside cover tells us that E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan 'was named an ALA Notable Children's Book'. The book has illustrations, a kind of Disney-style anthropomorphism certainly, but the vocabulary isn't particularly simplified, and I suspect many adults (young or otherwise) would really enjoy this tale of an outsider.

The story is about a swan named Louis (as in Armstrong) who is a swan who's mute, which is pretty serious when you're a trumpeter swan. (And there's some technical information about trumpeter swans, so this book is Educational, children, OK?) But Louis has a helper in the form of the human Sam Beaver, an eleven-year-old with a serious interest in wildlife. As you might imagine, Louis is a very smart swan, as smart — if not more — than humans, so eventually he decides that if he can communicate by learning English, it'll be a great advantage for him. We now have a fully literate swan flying back to his parents with a writing slate, but when he falls in love with the swan Serena, he still can't communicate with her.

So his father decides that to make a sound the only thing is to get Louis a trumpet, which he does by flying through the window of a music shop. But by the time Louis is learning to acquire an artificial voice, Serena has flown off. The other problem is Louis's guilt: he must raise money to pay for the stolen trumpet and the broken window. Eventually, having mastered the trumpet, he flies off to a summer camp where he saves a boy's life and is given a medal for it, then he flies to the Boston swan boats in the Public Garden where he makes a lot of money performing for the crowd. And so we have Louis, flying around with a trumpet, a medal, and a purse tied round his neck. Soon, he receives a highly lucrative offer to play a regular spot in a nightclub in Philadephia, and his bulging purse will soon make him a rich swan.

Yes, of course there's eventually a happy ending, and it actually reads much better than I can explain here, so I recommend it. On the back cover, John Updike is quoted as writing in The New York Times 'We are lucky to have this book.' I think so too.

Jacques Tati, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne (94), France

2011-12-03T11:33:00.004Z

One of my favorite movie directors is Jacques Tati, so I was delighted to discover, quite by chance as I was coming away from Rabelais's tower, some models based on Tati's Mon oncle. The reason, I later found out through Googling, was because the movie was filmed here.

A few years ago I read that in a poster Tati's pipe, in politically correct genuflection, had been airbrushed into a children's model windmill, so it's pleasing to see no such nonsense here, and that the dog is holding the man's pipe for him.

Dalida in Montmartre, 18th arrondissement, Paris, France

2011-12-03T11:24:00.001Z

Dalida (1933—87) was a troubled singer — born in Egypt to Italian parents — who became famous in France. The history of her relatively short life is a catalog of self-destruction filled with a number of largely self-destructive lovers. She killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates, leaving a note: 'Pardonnez-moi, la vie m'est insupportable' ('Excuse me — my life is unbearable').

The house where Dalida lived in rue d'Orchampt, Montmartre.

'DALIDA

a vécu dans cette maison

de 1962 à 1987

Ses amis Montmartrois ne l'oublierons pas'

The nearby place Dalida also remembers her.

The bust here is very striking.

'YOLANDA GIGLIOTTI
DITE
DALIDA
CHANTEUSE COMÉDIENNE
1933—1987'

There's a suggestion of the Victor Noir's penis or Montaigne's foot effect here, as many people seem to have rubbed Dalida's breasts for luck.

Marcel Proust and Xavier Privas in Auteuil, 10th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #51

2011-12-03T10:58:00.003Z

Auteuil was one of the last places I visited in Paris, but I couldn't miss this place, as it's the birthplace of Marcel Proust at 96 rue de Fontaine.

The plaque is surprisingly small, with very few words:

'ICI NAQUIT

MARCEL PROUST

LE 10 JUILLET 1871'

It was a bonus to find a plaque I wasn't aware of commemorating a writer I wasn't aware of either: the poet-songwriter Javier Privas, who died here.

'XAVIER PRIVAS

1863—1927

POÈTE-CHANSONNIER

HABITA CETTE MAISON

PENDANT LES DERNIÈRES

ANNÉES DE SA VIE'

And finally, in what should be the last blog post in this French literary series (unless I chance upon something I've missed), the Fondation d'Auteuil proved a very useful find for contemporary French books.

Sully Prudhomme in the 10th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #50

2011-12-03T10:35:00.004Z

René Armand François Prudhomme, more familiarly known as Sully Prudhomme (1839—1907), was born in Paris and died in Châtenay-Malabry. He was the first person to win the Nobel prize for Literature (in 1901). He was born here in rue du Faubourg Poissonnière in the 10th arrondissement.

Sully Prudhomme is most remembered for his poem 'Le Vase brisé' from his first collection, Stances et poèmes (1865), in which he sentimentalizes over a love affair which has broken his heart. Later, he would move away from this style toward a more Parnassian influence.

'Le Vase brisé

Le vase où meurt cette verveine
D'un coup d'éventail fut fêlé ;
Le coup dut l'effleurer à peine :
Aucun bruit ne l'a révélé.

Mais la légère meurtrissure,
Mordant le cristal chaque jour,
D'une marche invisible et sûre,
En a fait lentement le tour.

Son eau fraîche a fui goutte à goutte,
Le suc des fleurs s'est épuisé ;
Personne encore ne s'en doute,
N'y touchez pas, il est brisé.

Souvent aussi la main qu'on aime,
Effleurant le cœur, le meurtrit ;
Puis le cœur se fend de lui-même,
La fleur de son amour périt ;

Toujours intact aux yeux du monde,
Il sent croître et pleurer tout bas
Sa blessure fine et profonde ;
Il est brisé, n'y touchez pas.'

George Sand in Paris: Literary Île-de-France #49

2011-12-02T18:30:00.003Z

George Sand (1804—76) was born at 15 rue Meslay, which is today number 46, in the 3rd arrondissement. Her name at her birth was Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, although (partly under the inspiration of her friend Jules Sandeau) she started a fashion by adopting a male name: later, other women writers adopted men's names — Marie d'Agoult's was Daniel Stern, and Delphine de Girardin's Charles de Launay.

Sand was not brought up in Paris but in the château at Nohant by her grandmother, who was a passionate reader of Voltaire. She was married against her wishes to Baron Dudevant in 1822, but left him in 1831 to pursue independence as a writer.

'ICI EST NÉE LE 1 JUILLET 1804

AURORE DUPIN DITE GEORGE SAND

LITTÉRATEUR ET AUTEURE DRAMATIQUE'

One of Sand's later addresses in Paris was 31 rue de Seine, in the 5th arrondissement, which was occupied for many years by Raymond Duncan in the 20th century.

'GEORGE SAND (1804—76)

habita cette maison en 1831

puis RAYMOND DUNCAN

y créa l'Académie

de 1929 à 1966'

And a street in Auteuil in the 16th arrondissement remembers her.

The Marquis de Sade in the Château de Vincennes, 12th arrondissement: Literary Île-de-France #48

2011-12-02T18:12:00.003Z

The dungeon of the château de Vincennes, where the Marquis de Sade (1740—1812) was imprisoned in 1777, then from 1778 to 1784, after which he was transferred to the Bastille. He was known as 'Monsieur le 6' after the number of his cell. In the Bastille, he began writing his first important work — Cent vingt journées de sodome (One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom). Simone de Beauvoir remarked that he went into prison a man, and came out a writer.

In 1789, after yelling out of his prison window that the Bastille was slitting prisoners' throats and killing them, he was transferred to Charenton insane asylum and released in 1790.

Sade was later to spend years in Charenton — where he put on plays — after clandestinely publishing a number of 'obscene' books.

A man long associated with torture, flagellation, incest and rape among other horrors, the word 'sadisme' entered the French dictionary in 1834.

Victor Hugo in the 16th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #47

2011-12-02T18:01:00.002Z

Avenue Victor-Hugo is in the north of the 16th arrondissement, and after the Champs-Élyséesis the longest in Paris. Hugo lived at number 124, which was then a hotel. It was formerly called avenue d'Eylau, although its name was changed when Victor Hugo was 79, and is where he died. The present building was constructed by Pierre Humbert.

Above the doorway is a sculpture of Hugo's face by Fonquergne.

A plaque records the details of the site.

Jean Cocteau and Pierre Giffard in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, France: Literary Île-de-France #46

2011-12-02T17:41:00.004Z

As well as Jules Vallès, Jean Cocteau and Pierre Giffard have plaques marking their former residence in Maisons-Laffite. (As does Arthur Koestler, although the tourist bureau could only direct me to Cocteau's place: there's a point where tourism of the literary kind just becomes too obscure for the tourist industry, and that point is very soon reached.)

So here we have Cocteau's birthplace.

'Ici est né

le 5 juillet 1889

JEAN COCTEAU

Prince des Poètes'

Also in the town is Pierre Giffard's former house.

This has two plaques, and the weatherbeaten one (which bears two date discrepancies, one of them saying that he lived here a year after his death) provides additional information that he founded the paper Le Vélo and was the godfather of the Petite Reine.

The later plaque tells us that this place was known as 'The Grotto', which this other weatherbeaten photo shows.

Jean Racine and Blaise Pascal in the Église Saint Étienne du Mont, 5th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #45

2011-12-02T17:25:00.003Z

The Église Saint Étienne du Mont is a small church at the back of the Panthéon, and is noted for two tombs, although my Latin isn't up to translating these:

Blaise Pascal (1623—62).

Jean Baptiste Racine (1633—99).

The Panthéon, 5th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #44

2011-12-01T11:29:00.006Z

'Histoire de Paris

Le Panthéon

Guéri en 1774 d'une grave maladie, Louis XV décide la construction d'une église dédiée à sainte Geneviève. Soufflot en est l'architecte. Le chantier, commencé en 1764, fut très long, et l'édifice faillit s'écrouler sous la Révolution. En 1791, on transforme l'église en Panthéon destiné à recevoir la dépouille des grands hommes : Voltaire et Rousseau y sont transférés en grande pompe. Rendu au culte sous le premier Empire, le Panthéon retrouve définitivement sa vocation à la mort de Victor Hugo, en 1885. Depuis 1907, y repose également une femme : il s'agit de Marcelin Berthelot. Morts le même jour, ils ont ainsi choisi de rester unis dans la tombe.'

'History of Paris

The Panthéon

Cured of a serious illness in 1744, Louis XV decided to build a church dedicated to Saint Geneviève. The architect was Soufflot. The workshop was begun in 1764 and was very long, and the building almost fell under the revolution. In 1791 the church became The Panthéon, destined to receive the remains of great men: Voltaire and Rousseau were moved here with great ceremony. Returning to religious usage under the First Empire, the Panthéon finally found its vocation as a necropolis with the death of Victor Hugo in 1885. Since 1907, a woman has also rested here: Marcelin Berthelot's wife. Both died the same day, and they both remain united in the same grave.'

Albert Bartholomé's 'Monument to Jean-Jacques Rousseau' (1907).

To the left of the central group is Music, to the right Glory.

The central group depicts Philosophy between Nature and Truth.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Alphonse-Camille Terroir's 'To Diderot and the Encyclopédistes' (1913).

Two standing female figures with the inscription 'L'Encyclopédie prépare l'idée de la Révolution' ('L'Encyclopédie prepares for the idea of revolution').

To the left: Truth.

To the right: Strength.

Bottom center: the profile of Diderot on the tomb.

In the crypt are a number of other tombs. This is Rousseau's, which was brought here in 1794.

And next to him, Voltaire's statue and tomb.

Here there are the tombs of three writers.

Alexandre Dumas (1802—70).

Victor Hugo (1802—85).

Émile Zola (1840—1902). Zola's remains were moved from Montmartre Cemetery to the Panthéon in 1908, when Alfred Dreyfus was present. And the close of the ceremony, anti-Dreyfusard Louis Grégori fired his revolver at Dreyfus, who was only slightly injured in the arm.

Aimé Césaire was buried in his native Martinique, but a wall here is dedicated to him.

'AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

POÈTE, DRAMATURGE, HOMME POLITIQUE MARTINIQUAISE (1913—2008)

DÉPUTÉ DE LA MARTINIQUE (1915—99) ET MAIRE DE FORT-DE-FRANCE (1945—2001)

INLASSABLE ARTISAN DE LA DÉCOLONISATION, BÂTISSEUR

D'UNE "NÉGRITUDE" FONDÉE SUR L'UNIVERSALITÉ DES DROITS

DE L'HOMME "BOUCHE DES MALHEURS QUI N'ONT POINT DE
BOUCHE", IL A VOULU DONNER AU MONDE, PAR SES ÉCRITS ET

SON ACTION "LA FORCE DE REGARDER DEMAIN"

"J'HABITE UNE BLESSURE SACRÉE
J'HABITE DES ANCÊTRES IMAGINAIRES

J'HABITE UN VOULOIR OBSCUR

J'HABITE UN LONG SILENCE

J'HABITE UNE SOIF IRRÉMÉDIABLE"

More in the 6th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #43

2011-12-01T10:38:00.004Z

To the south of the Jardin du Luxembourg, at 3 rue Auguste Compte, is the building where the philosopher Simone Veil lived from 1929 to 1940.

'SIMONE VEIL
PHILOSOPHE

A HABITÉ CETTE MAISON

DE 1929 À 1940.'

To the north of the jardin du Luxembourg is rue de l'Odéon, where at number 12 Sylvia Beach published James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922.

'EN 1922,
DANS CETTE MAISON,

MELLE SYLVIA BEACH PUBLIA

"ULYSSES"

DE JAMES JOYCE.'

Next door is another plaque commemorating Thomas Paine living there from 1797 to 1802, underlining the help he gave toward the French Revolution.

'Thomas PAINE

1737—1809

Anglais de naissance

Américain d'adoption

Français par décret

a vécu dans cet immeuble de 1797 à 1802.

Il mit sa passion de la liberté au service de la

Révolution française, fut député à la Convention

et écrivit Les Droits de l'Homme.

"Lorsque les opinions sont libres, la force de la

vérité finit toujours par l'emporter"

Finally — and cheating slightly by moving to the 5th arrondissement — at 37 rue de la Bûcherie is the more recent bookstore 'Shakespeare and Company', a major meeting place for English-speakers (mainly Americans), and probably the biggest cliché I've yet posted up here.

Voltaire in Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine (92), France: Literary Île-de-France #42

2011-12-01T10:07:00.002Z

Although often said to have been born in Paris, Voltaire himself declared on several occasion that he was born in Châtenay-Malabry (Voltaire's parents having stayed in the town the same year as his birth), and this small town in Hauts-de-Seine clearly proclaims this.

Le Voltaire at 1 place Voltaire has a bar-café that also exploits the person it sees as its famous son.

And on the roof is a statue niche with a bust of Voltaire that was erected here in the first half of the 19th century.

At the crossroads on the principal street there's a really impressive bust of Voltaire, with a fountain.

On the back of it is a quotation of Voltaire's, stating that the best work he'd perflormed was in doing a little good:

'J'AI FAIT

UN PEU DE BIEN

C'EST MON

MEILLEUR OUVRAGE

VOLTAIRE

1694—1778'

Chateaubriand at the Vallée-aux-Loups, Aulnay, Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine (92), France: Literary Île-de-France #41

2011-11-25T15:39:00.002Z

The first person to build at the Vallée-aux-Loups was André—Arnoult Acloque, a brewer and soldier of the national guard who wanted to live closer to his uncle. He built a small one-storey house there, but was forced to sell up with the fall of the monarchy in 1792.

Retreating from Paris (as he'd wished for a few years before) after an article in the Mercure de France, in which he compared Napoleon to Nero, François—René de Chateaubriand and his wife Céleste bought La Vallée-aux-Loups in 1807 pretty much as Aclocque had left it. Chateaubriand began transforming the former inhabitant's 'gardener's house', and this is what it looks like today.

The portico with caryatids, recalling Chateaubriand's journey to Greece.

Aclocque had built a pavilion in the grounds, which Chateaubriand named 'Tour Velléda' from his book Les Martyrs. It is here that he began Mémoires d'Outre—Tombe.

Chateaubriand also occupied himself with the garden, which he wanted to serve as a memory of the places he'd visited. This was essentially an English garden, with for instance cedars reminding him of the east and catalpas of North America. Above is a cedar planted by him.

Above is an example of a very well preserved 18th century ice house with an underground tank 5.5 meters across and six meters in depth, giving 150 tonnes of ice.

After the fall of the Empire things had begun to look politically promising for Chateaubriand with the publication of his De Buonaparte et des Bourbons in 1814, but two years later, after writing a post scriptum to his De la monarchie selon la Charte, his work was seized, he was struck off the list of ministers of state and his pension withdrawn. He was forced to sell La Vallée-aux-Loups between 1817 and 1818. The Montmorency wing here is named after Matthieu de Montmorency, who was the next owner of the property.

The La Rochefoucauld wing. After Montmorency died in 1826, it became his daughter Elizabeth's, who was married to Sosthènes de la Rochefoucauld, Duke of Doudeauville, who appears to be best known for the mockery he received by lengthening the skirts of dancers at the Opéra and for puritanically covering up the particular anatomical parts of statues that obviously offended him. A digression: that has no direct relation to the La Rochefoucauld wing.

Sosthènes's property passed to his two sons in 1841, although it wasn't until 1849 that 'Sosthènes II' fully came to the property as the single owner of it. A rich and very active social networker of the day, Sosthènes' II soon added a wing on the opposite side to the Montmorency wing, sandwiching Chateaubriand's original property.

The house was opened to the public in 1987.

This plaque lists the works Chateaubriand wrote while he lived here between 1807 and 1818.

'CHATEAUBRIAND
VÉCVT ICI DE 1807 À 1818
ORNA LA DEMEVRE
PLANTA LE PARC
ÉCRIVIT

LES MARTYRS
L'ITINÉRAIRE DE PARIS À JÉRVSALEM
LE DERNIER ABÉCÉNERAGE
MOÏSE
COMMENCA LES ÉTVDES HISTORIQUES
LES MÉMOIRES D'OVTRE-TOMBE'

'LA VALLÉE-AVX-LOUPS, DE TOVTES
LES CHOSES QVI ME SON ÉCHAPPÉES,
EST LA SEVLE CHOSE QVE JE REGRETTE'
MÉMOIRES D'OVTRE-TOMBE

The Museum of Romantic Life / Le Musée de la vie romantique, 9th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #40

2011-11-25T14:23:00.005Z

'Histoire de Paris

Hôtel Renan—Scheffer

Sur les terrains de ancienne maison religieuse de Saint—Lazare, vendus comme biens nationaux en 1792, d'habiles spéculateurs avaient créé, vers 1815, un vaste parc d'attractions dont les "Montagnes russes", les premières en France formaient le clou. Vendus vers 1820, ces terrains furent lotis en petits hôtels avec jardins qui attirèrent la jeunesse romantique un peu fortunée de l'époque. Le peintre Ary Scheffer s'installa dans la rue Chaptal nouvellement ouverte et aménagea autour de son petit hôtel un atelier et un jardin d'hiver avec fontaine en rocaille. Peintre d'histoire et habile portraitiste, Scheffer recevait ici toute la société artistique et littéraire de son temps : Chopin et George Sand, ses voisins du square d'Orléans, Franz Liszt et Pauline Viardot, Lamennais et l'historien Augustin Thierry. Ce dernier y amenait Ernest Renan, qui devait épouser Cornélie Scheffer, nièce du maître de maison. Transmis par la famille Renan à la Ville de Paris, ce lieu conscré au monde artistique et littéraire des années 1820 à 1860 est devenu le Musée de la vie romantique.'

'History of Paris

Renan—Scheffer Hotel

On the grounds of the former religious house of Saint—Lazare, sold as national property in 1792, smart speculators had created, by about 1815, a huge amusement park whose Big Dippers, the first in France, formed the main attraction. Sold in about 1820, these lands were divided into small hotels with gardens that attracted the quite wealthy romantic youth of the day. The painter Ary Scheffer settled here in the newly built rue Chaptal and arranged around his little hotel a workroom and winter garden with a stone fountain. A historical painter and a gifted portraitist, Scheffer welcomed here the whole artistic and literary world of his time: Chopin and George Sand, his neighbors from the square d'Orléans, Franz Liszt and Pauline Viardot, Lamennais and the historian Augustin Thierry. Thierry brought here Ernest Renan, who would marry Cornélie Scheffer, the niece of the master of the house. Given to the City of Paris by the Renan family, this site dedicated to the artistic and literary world of the years 1820 to 1860 became the Museum of Romantic Life.'

The Museum of Romantic Life.

Bust of Ernest Renan, by Léopold Bernhard Bernstamm.

Mme Ernest Renan, born Cornélie Schaffer, by Ary Schaffer, 1837.

Cornélia Marjolin—Scheffer, by her father Ary Scheffer, 1857.

Balzac and statue, 8th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #39

2011-11-25T14:01:00.001Z

Hôtel Balzac (formerly rue Fortunée where Balzac's last home was) is on the street of the same name.

And it's just on the corner of rue Lord Byron.

Balzac's statue stands on place Georges-Guillaumin by the junction of the avenue de Friedland with rue Balzac . It was erected in 1902, and built first by Alexandre Falguière, then finished by Paul Dubois.

Place des Vosges, 4th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #38

2011-11-25T13:25:00.006Z

Victor Hugo moved into the second floor of the Hôtel Rohan-Guéménée, 6 Place des Vosges, with his wife and four children in 1833. This was to be his longest stay in one place, and he left in 1848.

And I think they tend to over-emphasize the point, but:

'VICTOR HUGO

HABITA DANS CET HÔTEL

DE 1833 À 1848'

There's a great deal of information about Louise Michel in the museum, such as a booklet in the anteroom that reproduces a verse from Hugo's poem 'Vito Major', written after the fall of the Commune, in which he praises her hatred for inhumanity and her care for children, seeing a great tenderness beneath her anger:

'Ta bonté, ta fierté de femme populaire,
L'âpre attendrissement qui dort sous ta colère,
Ton long regard de haine à tous les inhumains,
Et les pieds des enfants réchauffés dans tes mains.'

The letters between them were many. The anarchist and the republican evidently had their differences, but they both believed in justice, equality, freedom for children and women, and a free and non-religious education system.

Two examples of Michel's novels are shown in the museum, La Misère (1882) and Les Mépriseés, both of which were co-written with Victoire Marguerite Tinayre (1831—95), writing as 'Jean Guêtré'. Tinayre led free schools in the Second Empire and took part in the Commune when she was the school inspector for the 12th arrondissement. La Misère was a popular success, and concerns the question of prostitution, a theme also taken up in Les Mépriseés, which was heavily influenced by Hugo's Les Misérables.

Madame Paul Mauride by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. Mauride was a republican who visited Michel in her prison in Versailles.

The marble bust of Hugo is by David d'Angers (alias Jean-Pierre David), and was made in 1938. The two had met in 1927, and Hugo dedicated two poems to him.

During Hugo's exile in Guernsey, his mistress Juliette Drouet lived in La Farrue, a house close to Hugo's family, for seven years before moving to rue de Hauteville in 1864, the very place where Hugo had spent his first year in exile. It was called Hauteville Fairy, and Hugo took care of the décor.

These two photos show a reconstruction of Drouet's Salon chinois at Guernsey, which was installed here for the inugural ceremony of the museum in 1903. It is, entirely, a work of Hugo's imagination.

A reconstruction of Hugo's salon, rue de Clichy.

Next door, there's a plaque to remind that Théophile Gautier once lived there:

'LE POÈTE

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

A VÉCU DANS CETTE MAISON

DE 1828 À 1834'

A little further along is another plaque, telling of the birth of Madame de Sévigné:

'DANS CET HÔTEL

EST NÉE

LE 6 FÉVRIER 1626

MARIE DE RABUTIN CHANTAL

MARQUISE DE SÉVIGNÉ'

Beyond the Place des Vosges, at 62 rue St-Antoine, is L'Hôtel de Sully. Here in 1725, when Voltaire was dining, a servant entered to tell him that someone wanted to see him outside. It was Guy-Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, who had insulted Voltaire for not using his real name, Jean François-Marie Arouet. Rohan-Chabot's servants beat him up with sticks. Voltaire never got his revenge.

Today, the hôtel is home to the national archives.

Passerelle Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1st/7th arrondissements, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #37

2011-11-25T11:20:00.009Z

The original name for this bridge was Pont de Solferino.

However, on the centenary of the birth of the Senegalese poet, who was the president of Senegal for twenty years, it was renamed the Passerelle Léopold Sédar Senghor.

A curious thing about the bridge is the custom of lovers leaving locks there with their names, and there must be several hundreds of these locks along the bridge.

But this is not a new phenomenon and exists in several other countries. Love padlocks, or love locks can, for example, be found on the Ponte Milvio in Rome, a custom which is attributed to Federico Moccia's book Ho volgia di ti (I Want You), which was later turned into a movie.

Most of them are written on with highlighter.

Many are presumably been there a long time from the rust on them.

And some couples make the effort to have them engraved.

Returning to Senghor, to the south-east of Paris, at St-Maur-Des-Fossés in Val-de-Marne, is Avenue Léopold Sédar Senghor, where there is even a quotation:

'J'AI RÊVÉ D'UN MONDE DE SOLEIL

DANS LA FRATERNITÉ DE MES FRÈRES

AU YEUX BLEUES

LÉOPOLD SÉDAR SENGHOR

ÉCRIVAIN ET HOMME POLITIQUE

SÉNÉGALAIS 1906—2001'

Arthur Rimbaud and the Vilains bonhommes 6th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #36

2011-11-23T18:11:00.005Z

At the corner of the rue Bonaparte and the rue du Vieux Colombier the literary group 'Vilains bonshommes' met on the first floor of what was then the Denogeant restaurant. These were such people as Paul Verlaine, Elzear Bonnier, Léon Valade, Émile Blémont, Jean Aicart, Ernest d'Hervilly, and Camille Pelletier, and it was here that 1871 Arthur Rimbaud read 'Le Bateau ivre' for the first time, or 'launched' it is without doubt a better expression.

In June 2010 a plaque was erected here by the Association des Amis d'Arthur Rimbaud:

'Ici

en 1871

le poéte

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

a lancé

le BATEAU IVRE

Les ami de RIMBAUD

16 juin 2010'

Les Deux Magots, St Germain des Près, 6th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #35

2011-11-23T17:48:00.002Z

'"Histoire de Paris

Les Deux Magots

Ouvert en 1813, "Les Deux Magots" a connu très tôt les faveurs du monde littéraire : à l'origine magasin de nouveautés, l'un des premiers à Paris, il est cité par Balzac et Anatole France. Un café lui succède en 1881, bientôt fréquenté par Verlaine, Mallarmé et Wilde. En 1914, l'établissement prend l'aspect qu'on lui connaît aujourd'hui, et devient l'un des rendez-vous de l'élite intellectuelle. Les surréalistes en font leur quartier général : Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand et Jacques Chardonne s'y croisent, ainsi que Joyce et Hemingway. En 1933, quelques habitués, dont Bataille, Leiris et Philippon, fondent le Prix des Deux Magots, pour la première fois décerné à Raymond Queneau. Les intellectuels d'avant guerre, les plus grands noms des Lettres, des Arts et du Spectacle fréquentent ses célèbres terraces : Camus, Genet, Giacometti sont présents, Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir s'y installent chaque jour pour écrire.'

'"History of Paris

Les Deux Magots

Opening in 1813, "Les Deux Magots" experienced the favors of the literary world from very early on : originally a novelty shop — one of the first in Paris — it is mentioned by Balzac and Anatole France. A café followed it in 1881, soon to be patronized by Verlaine, Mallarmé and Wilde. In 1914 it took on the appearance that we know today, and became one of the meeting places of the intellectual élite. The surrealists made it their general quarters : Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand and Jacques Chardonne crossed paths here, as well as Joyce and Hemingway. In 1933 some regulars, such as Bataille, Leiris and Philippon, established the Prix des Deux Magots, which went in the first year to Raymond Queneau. The pre-war intellectuals, the greatest names in letters, arts and spectacle : Camus, Genet, Giacometti were here, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat down here every day to write.'

Rabelais at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne (94), France: Literary Île-de-France #34

2011-11-22T18:29:00.002Z

The so-called 'Tour Rabelais' ('Rabelais's Tower') in Parc de l'Abbaye in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés was built between 1358 and 1360 as an important fortification point of the abbey during the Hundred Years' War (`1337—1453).

Rabelais (1483(?)—1553) was the private secretary of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, the first dean of the secularized St-Maur-des-Fossés abbey in 1533. He was one of the canons and stayed here in 1536, 1537, and 1550, finishing writing his Quart Livre (Fourth Book here. He would have stayed in one of the abbey lodges and the castle built pour the cardinal by Philibert Delorme, but not in this tower.

The Rodin Museum / Le Musée Rodin, 7th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #33

2011-11-22T18:12:00.004Z

The Rodin Museum was established in 1916 after three donations by Auguste Rodin (1840—1917) to the French state of his works, collections, library, letters, and manuscripts. It is where the former hôtel Biron was, which Rodin had rented from 1908.

A plaque stating that (the poet) Rainer-Maria Rilke lived there from 1908-1911.

The museum gardens have a number sculptures relating to literature. This in bronze (1902—04) is The Three Shadows (Les Trois Ombres), and is a representation from Dante's The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), with its warning: 'Abandon hope all you who enter here'. The three figures are identical, and Rodin gives them back the hands missing from them at the top of his work The Door to Hell (La Porte de'L'enfer) (1880—1917).

Rodin worked on La Porte de l'Enfer for many years, drawing on the figures (over 200) here for the rest of his working life.

He died before seeing the full masterpiece put together in cast iron.

The Victor Hugo monument.

A detail of the monument to Hugo.

In a gallery of marble exhibits there are several representations of Hugo.

There is also a bust of George Bernard Shaw, made in 1906.

On the other side of the hotel is the statue of Balzac.

Finally, it would probably be a mistake to exclude Le Penseur (The Thinker).