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

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

of

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

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)

There are several reasons why I didn't give up on this book: sheer determination, the enticing obscurity of it, and the 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 cow 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

'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)

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)

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...

Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis:
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Dany Boon's Bienvenue Chez les Ch'tis
Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, Bergues, Nord

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

A brief 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.

My other Edna St Vincent Millay posts:
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Edna St Vincent Millay, Austerlitz, NY
Nancy Milford: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Delphine de Vigan: Les Heures souterraines (2009)

'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 Trial. 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.

Links to my other Delphine de Vigan posts:
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Delphine de Vigan: No et moi

Delphine de Vigan: Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit
Delphine de Vigan: Jours sans faim
Delphine de Vigan: Les jolis garçons

Marguerite Duras: L'Amante Anglaise (1967)

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 Menthe Anglaise' ('English Mint'), and even (more indirectly) to 'La Menthe 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.

My Marguerite Duras posts:
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Marguerite Duras: La Pute de la côte normande
Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir
Marguerite Duras: Agatha
Marguerite Duras: Emily L.
Marguerite Duras: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
Marguerite Duras: L'Amant | The Lover
Marguerite Duras: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein
Marguerite Duras: L'Amante anglaise
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Marguerite Duras: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras: L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas
Marguerite Duras: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia
Marguerite Duras: Le Marin de Gibraltar | The Sailor from Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras: La Douleur | The War: A Memoir
Yann Andréa: Cet amour-là
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier: Les Parleuses
Marguerite Duras: Savannah Bay
Marguerite Duras: Détruire, dit-elle | Destroy, She Said
Marguerite Duras: L'Amour
Marguerite Duras: Dix heures et demie du soir en été
Marguerite Duras: Le Square | The Square
Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents
Marguerite Duras: Le Shaga
Marguerite Duras: Oui, peut-être
Marguerite Duras: Des journées entières dans les arbres
Marguerite Duras: Suzanna Andler
Marguerite Duras: Le Vice-Consul | The Vice Consul
Marguerite Duras: Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle
Marguerite Duras: La Vie tranquille
Marguerite Duras: La Pluie d'été

David Foenkinos: La Délicatesse (2009)

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.

Addendum: This book has been adapted into a movie starring Audrey Tautou, directed by the author, and called Delicacy in English.

My David Foenkinos posts:
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David Foenkinos: La Délicatesse
David Foenkinos: Le Potentiel érotique de ma femme

Emmanuel Bove: Le Piège (1945)

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 similarities 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 to 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 re-publication — is a contributory factor.

My other posts on Emmanuel Bove:
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Emmanuel Bove: Cœurs et visages
Emmanuel Bove: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Emmanuel Bove: Mes amis

L. S. Lowry in Nottingham, England

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)

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)

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.

Links to my other Besson post, and Queneau's grave:

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Raymond Queneau: Les Enfants du limon
Queneau's grave, Juvisy-sur-Orge

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

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)

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

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

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.
Dalida's tomb in Montmartre Cemetery – surprisingly rather difficult to find – is stunning:

 

 

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

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 Xavier 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

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

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.

My George Sand posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
La Maison de George Sand, Nohant-Vic, Indre
George Sand in Paris: Literary Île-de-France #49
George Sand: La Petite Fadette
Norma Tessum Onda, St Maurice, La Rochelle
George Sand and Le Moulin d'Angibault, Montipouret, Indre