CARRY THE ONE By Carol Anshaw.
Anshaw pays close attention to the lives of a group of friends bound together by a fatal accident in this wry, humane novel, her fourth.

IN ONE PERSON By John Irving.
Irving’s funny, risky new novel about an aspiring writer struggling with his sexuality examines what happens when we face our desires honestly.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE By Michael Chabon.
Chabon’s rich comic novel about fathers and sons in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., juggles multiple plots and mounds of pop culture references in astonishing prose.

THE TESTAMENT OF MARY By Colm Toibin.
This beautiful work takes power from the surprises of its language and its almost shocking characterization of Mary, mother of Jesus.

ALL WE KNOW: Three Lives By Lisa Cohen.
The vanished world of midcentury upper-class lesbians is portrayed as beguiling, its inhabitants members of a stylish club.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER? A Comic Drama By Alison Bechdel.
Bechdel’s engaging, original graphic memoir explores her troubled relationship with her distant mother.

FLAGRANT CONDUCT: The Story of Lawrence Vs. Texas By Dale Carpenter.
Carpenter stirringly describes the 2003 Supreme Court decision that overturned the Texas sodomy law.

ODDLY NORMAL: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality By John Schwartz. A Times reporter’s deeply affecting account of his son’s coming out also reviews research on the experience of LGBT kids.

VICTORY: The Triumphant Gay Revolution By Linda Hirshman.
Written with knowing finesse, this expansive history of gay rights from the early 20th century to the present draws on archives and interviews.

WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? By Jeanette Winterson.
Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother.

Although I have read quite a number of these titles myself, for this post I am merely promoting what The New York Times said in their brief reviews. Their full list of 100 titles can be found at this URL http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

What Tóibín has done is what I would have loved to be able to do in my book Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography.  In fact when I finished that book, I did play with the idea of writing a gospel of Mary.  I’m glad Tóibín’s done it instead.  Far better a writer than I, he has made her so achingly human that even as you read, mesmerized, his clear, cold-eyed prose makes you want to weep.  I have no idea how he does this, but I’m glad he does.

He writes in the voice of Mary as she looks back, her own death nearing. You could say it’s the voice of a disillusioned Mary, but this woman has never had any illusions. Instead, she’s transcendently clear-eyed.

Among many other things, this short, almost terrifyingly lucid novel is a brilliant commentary on how “history” is constructed.  Mary watches in dismay as the disciples set about creating their own version of her son’s life and death.  They “interview” her as a matter of obligation, but can’t hide their frustration when she refuses to endorse their manufactured memories.  She sees them as almost threatening presences, enforcers of their constructed view of things.  She feels “the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief,” along with “their efforts to make simple sense of things that are not simple.”

But what carries this novel above all is the sheer beauty of the writing — the extraordinary voice, the lambent clarity of it.  You find that you want to read it as slowly as possible.  You start marking passage after passage.  Like this on the first page:

I cannot say more than I can say.  And I know how deeply this disturbs them and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdotes or sharp, simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.  I have no further need of smiling.  Just as I had no further need for tears.

or this, which is kind of perfect for this time of year, at least in the northern hemisphere:

Now that the days are shorter and the nights are cold, when I look out of the windows I have begun to notice something that surprises me and holds me.  There is a richness in the light.  It is as if, in becoming scarce, in knowing that it has less time to spread its gold over where we are, it lets loose something more intense, something that is filled with a shivering clarity.  And then when it begins to fade, it seems to leave raked shadows on everything.  And during that hour, the hour of ambiguous light, I feel safe to slip out and breathe the dense air when the colors are fading and the sky seems to be pulling them in, calling them home, until gradually nothing stands out in the landscape.

Like that light, this novel is extraordinary.  It has a luminous quality that I can’t quite explain.  But if the sentimentalization of faith sometimes makes you ache for the disillusionment of atheism, read this book.

I suppose I expected something just as startling or subversive in a new short book by Colm Toibin, “The Testament of Mary,” published by Scribner this month.

In a way, this is just what happened – although not in the way that I expected.

Toibin gives us a portrait of the mother of Jesus in her heartbroken old age: living in Ephesus, visited (and harassed) by the Gospel writers who want her to corroborate the story of Jesus that they’re writing. One of them scowls at her “when the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained.”

What does she think of her son’s disciples?

They’re nothing but “a group of misfits, who were only children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye.”

This book started as a dramatic monologue performed before Dublin audiences, and all I could think was: Well, I wonder what people in the world’s most Catholic nation think of this!

After all, Mary’s not the figure of the Pieta, holding the body of her son after he is taken off the cross: She flees, terrified for her life.  There are many more provocative revelations — but I won’t spoil them — all rendered in Toibin’s characteristically beautiful, lyrical prose.

In the end, Toibin gives us a Mary who isn’t Isis, or Leda. She’s not a figure surrounded by stained-glass or stretching across the ceiling of countless church domes. Toibin’s testament presents us with someone far more powerful and easier to understand: A mother. Toibin’s Mary is human, all too human.

Related articles

• ‘Testament Of Mary’ Gives Fiery Voice To The Virgin (npr.org)
• The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín – review (guardian.co.uk)
• The Testament Of Mary (warrenellis.com)

A brisk fall evening edged with early darkness beckons, welcoming you into an overstuffed chair with a light throw stationed nearby should the dipping temperatures require it. You ease into the chair and just before you reach for the remote you see the pristine paperback cover of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. Read one paragraph, and you’re sold. You settle more deeply into your favorite seat and commit to a story you’re destined to love.

Brooklyn is my idea of the perfect little novel: deceptively simple in its plot and theme, the novel easily seduces the reader into a world like hers, but unlike hers. This coming of age story set in the years following the Second World War reveals itself through the thoughts and actions of Eilis, a bright young thing sent from Ireland to Brooklyn, the New World, for a better life. Eilis’s painfully noble, yet naive acceptance of her path is a reflection of a different time, a time in which emotional twinges or self-doubts were not fodder for public consumption. I found myself aching for a solution for Eilis’s dilemma which might include a marriage of the best of our own times, that honesty about self and situation,  and that of past eras, a unquestioned duty to self and others, a willingness to “get on with it.”

Brooklyn makes a thoughtful gift for your best friend, your mother, or anyone who’s ever had to make his or her way in the world. I guess that makes it appropriate for us all.

Brent Bozell ~

A Christian can be crushed gazing at the picture of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, watching her beloved son suffocate, and die. But in that vision she stands there for hours, patiently enduring her suffering. For two millennia, she has been a role model for Christians, a woman who practiced obedience in the most difficult of human circumstances, with fervent hope for what this sacrifice will offer all mankind as it struggles with sin.

This is why it seems so hard to reflect that vision of patience when black-hearted “artists” practice character assassination on the Blessed Virgin Mary to strip her of every virtue: her patience, her obedience, her courageous love, and her prayerful faith in God. On November 13, Simon & Schuster launched a vicious little 96-page novella titled “The Testament of Mary.”

The author, an Irish ex-Catholic named Colm Toibin,  presents us instead with a Bible-burning “reimagination” of an alienated Mary that fled the scene of her son’s death in fear for her own life. Two decades after the Resurrection – or was there one? – this anti-Mary is filled with bitterness and rage. She describes herself as “unhinged” and bubbling with contempt for her son’s demented followers, to the extreme that she threatens the Gospel writers with a knife. She lives as a bandit, stealing to survive.

Colm Toibin

Her son’s followers must be stopped from making Jesus a god, “or else everything that happened will become a sweet story that will grow poisonous as bright berries that hang low on trees.” Toibin describes the scene of the crucifixion in mercenary terms: “It was like a marketplace, but more intense somehow, the act that was about to take place was going to make a profit for both seller and buyer.”

Christ’s disciples are “fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers,” while her son’s preaching sounded to her “false, and his tone all stilted, and I could not bear to hear him, it was like something grinding and it set my teeth on edge.” There is no God in her Father or her Son. She proclaims of the death of Jesus only that “when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.”

Toibin’s last book of literary criticism was titled “New Ways to Kill Your Mother.” In this book, he murders the Mother of God.

In a positive critique in The New York Times, reviewer Mary Gordon explained “The making of the Gospels is portrayed not as an act of sacred remembrance but as an invasion and a theft. The Evangelists — which are they? Luke, perhaps, or John? — are portrayed as menacing intruders, with the lurking shadowy presence of Stalin’s secret police.”

In our nation’s most prestigious newspaper, an author and his feminist reviewer can conjure up the apostles of Christ as Stalinist torturers. But when a Danish newspaper published cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad as a freedom-of-speech test in 2005, the Times would not show them, “a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols.”

This is what Toibin’s book is: a gratuitous assault on Christianity and its central drama of salvation. The Times reviewer recognized that, and enjoyed it.

“Mary, the mother of Jesus, has given Christianity a good name. None of the negatives that have made Christianity a byword for tyranny, cruelty and licensed hatred have attached to her,” Gordon began. “The problem with all this is that it has led to centuries of sentimentality — blue and white Madonnas with folded hands and upturned eyes, a stick with which to beat independent women.”

Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles was less laudatory: “If you’d enjoy a tale predicated on the idea that Christian faith is a toxic collection of ‘foolish anecdotes’ based on a ‘fierce catastrophe,’ Merry Christmas!”

Charles found it refreshing this garbage bag of words “hasn’t sparked outrage or boycotts — a reassuring testament to the West’s tolerance for such artistic license and Toibin’s prominence. Some of us are a lot calmer nowadays about creative re-imaginings of sacred figures.”

He somehow left Catholics out of the picture as he expressed relief that “Evangelicals in this country may finally have caught on to the fact that fiery condemnation plays right into the marketing plans of books that would otherwise ascend into oblivion.” He notes Toibin’s tome has been “widely praised in England, but Toibin is a larger presence there, and churchgoing isn’t.”

Somehow, he’s not making the obvious connection: Toibin and other God-hating authors are consciously conspiring to empty out the churches, and Christian believers cannot always refuse to condemn them. Speaking up for Christ and His mother (and ours) is a solemn duty, not an option.

L. Brent Bozell III is the President of the Media Research Center . http://www.mrc.org/public/default.aspx

Read more Great Articles at NewsBusters . http://newsbusters.org/

Dear friends and readers,

Last night we went to a local bookstore which regularly hosts talks and classes about books (as well as a weekly storybook hour for children and tours too), Politics and Prose. We’d never been there before, and to the area only once, when last July we were invited to come to a fourth of July barbecue (what a treat for us). A member of the Irish embassy asked all those who came to read James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloom Day. We heard about this because Jim got an email from the Irish embassy which now has his name.

A large old-fashioned bookstore, two floor (!), where books are actually set up by their categories and within that the author’s name. A couple tables upfront with latest sellers, and in the back audiobooks on CD. You can wander about and come upon treasures just like this. I saw Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman (a biography of Lillian Hellman) on display, but had decided for Toibin’s Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, a book of somewhat rewritten essay-review meditations published elsewhere (the LRB, the NYRB and other places). If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how much I like his essays, and how I’ve loved those of his novels I’ve read thus far. It turns out I’ve read 4 of 7 (In praise of Colm Toibin: Un-put-downable).

Last night he was there to promote his latest novel (apparently the 7th), The Testament of Mary. Yes the central character is the Virgin Mary (does she have a last name like the rest of us?). It’s a really a novella, a short one at that, and from what he wrote a retrospective meditation by Mary some 20 years after the brutal crucifixion of her son. She is now living in safety, relative peace, left to herself by all and two visitors show up, one Lazarus. Yes he takes liberties — good historical fiction often does. The core idea is the irretrievableness of what happened and how she cannot forget and if she could change it, do it differently somehow, how she longs to. It’s memories poured out. As a subjective narrative by a women it harks back to his great The South. He seems to have a predilection for writing heroine’s texts (Brooklyn, Henry James in The Master is a kind of male heroine).

What a large crowd. It did not overwhelm the store, but it was much larger than we’d expected of such an intellectual sensitive author. There were not enough chairs for all.

He began by telling us of his trips to Venice and two paintings of the Virgin he had stood before repeated: a Tintoretto, perhaps The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and a Titian, The Assumption. What he seems to have liked especially about the latter was her red robe and how she soared above reality. He is himself getting older.

Recent photo — he does look like this, only he is a small man, somewhat bent, light brownish-white skin, light brown hair

Today I see that the Tintoretto has Mary in a red robe too, and the picture’s content against the reason for its festival, takes us across her life.

They were the inspiration for the book. He did not tell us why he wrote it, only that he would like it to be taken seriously and he didn’t mean it as a mock. He didn’t think the church would bother notice it — he said this in answer to one question afterwards. He does read very well, and his voice was how I’d imagined it, Irish lilt but not too heavy. I stayed awake and listening for much of it, though when his register came too low I couldn’t hear it all. We were in the back, having arrived only ten minutes before the “reading” started.

It was obvious he’d done this many times. He was smooth, and seemed such a sweet man. These sorts of things are part of what makes an author successful. The book launch. He’s learned how to do it. Among questions asked were does he have a routine, a place he always writes, what does he write with. He said he writes anywhere and with any thing (mostly a pen) and no he’s not a routine type. He does sometimes have to write a book quickly or whatever quickly lest he forget it; get it down, and then he comes back to work at it. He is not a man who has written a lot of very long books, say like Dickens, Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Wm Dean Howells, and they all had fixed routines and places they wrote. He has made his career through socializing too and his oeuvre (in pages) most actually be preponderantly non-fiction.

I wanted to reply to something he had said before starting his readings. He said that other “classic” fiction novels, 19th century, were no help “here.” He comically alluded to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, they could not help him. Nor Henry James. Perhaps Mrs Touchett (Ralph’s mother, isolated, alone, an “odd” woman.) While he was reading I thought of Daniel Deronda’s mother, Eliot’s older heroine who returns 25 years after giving her son up to another so she could have an operatic career, a life of her own. Now bitter, not remorseful, but regretful because after all she ended up marrying and having children anyway. The dreams she had had not been realized and how here was this son reproaching her.
But the mike was too far away.

I didn’t try to buy anything directly afterwards. The line became very long. Instead we walked three stores down to the Comet, a pizza place with ambience. A large screen played over and over the poignant short Italian film, The Red Balloon. No sound just the images before you. The walls gray. The tables ping-pong, the seats benches. Soft lights. We had two pizzas, small, a white (all cheese, garlicky nothing else) and a red (just tomato sauce topping, more spicy, reminding me in its heavy dough and yummy surface of pizza in NYC in the 1950s, so-called Napoles-like). A carafe of chianti. The place was moderately full.

We talked. We realized this was probably the first book reading we’ve ever gone to as such. Play readings by a group, lectures, maybe a book reading within a performance of other things, but not alone. Jim said we never went to the Folger poetry readings because they cost. This was for free. Also the people were less known and there was obviously time for too much talk. So too much egoism would be on display he felt. I remembered going to listen to Empson read his poem in the Graduate Center in the 1970s. How he read little and talked much of his poetry. But the talk was splendid, really insightful (as Toibin’s was not quite, though not deliberately misleading as say Andrew Davies on his films), and how John Hollander got up to ask questions, all admiring and how Empson (spiteful in this but perhaps made uncomfortable) cut him down, half-mocked him. Also a lecture by Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. All I can recall is how intelligent and humane she was and ever after have reacted to all dismissals of her work, denigrations of her with a memory of this seeing her and knowing they are unfair to her.

We decided we would try some more at this place. Then to support the bookstore, we went back. That’s when I bought Love in a Dark Time. All the Testaments to Mary were gone. To tell the truth, I was not sure I wanted it, as I felt it would be wrapped up in Catholicism as some level, and I’m an atheist. I was sure it’d be feminist in intent. If Toibin had said he found out or invented a last name for her, and told us of it, I might’ve. They had only had his most recent novels: (Blackwater Lightship two copies, one still left, and mostly Brooklyn and The Master, latest and best known. I have them all plus The South and Homage to Barcelona (not there). But there was suddenly one copy as if from deep in a basement (the girl at the counter said it was “a backlist” book), this book of essays. So I snatched it. His essay on Wilde’s exposure of his homosexuality as “found out,” as a person wanting to be “found out” has influenced my thinking ever since.

We got home by 10ish, not too long to write one final blog on Jane Austen’s letters. I’m not going to give them up, but maybe go yet slower and do it by myself. The prompting from Austen-l helps, and the sense (however deluded) of reaching people, but the flak, the continual cliched readings and occasional either preposterous or theoretical agendas don’t help me at all. I waste time and make no friends refuting them.

Earlier that day I had talked on WWWTTA about Temple Grandin’s film about how animals form bonds, friendships, and people’s perception of them, and the trajectory the film belonged to. Really worth while and gotten into other debates on the growing dissemination of how it’s okay for women to subjugate themselves to sadism, even light fun … ), but I’ll add these as brief comments here later today.

We wished we could have more such nights. People are only gradually becoming aware of what a delightful city DC is slowly turning into. The neighborhood around there is small houses, apartments further off, and some shopping blocks. It’s marred by a large street which traffic streams through daily and that obscures the quiet ambience of the play otherwise. I’ve vowed to myself to read Love in a Dark Time, Homage to Barcelona, and (connected to Toibin and the project on book illustrations to Trollope which I’ve just finished — a blog this weekend), Amy Tucker’s The Illustration of the Master.

Reprinted by Tucker, it was chosen by James as a frontispiece for A Portrait of Lady, and could serve as frontispiece for Toibin’s The Master.

Ellen

Colm Toibin has stepped into the lives of historical figures before with spectacular success. The Irish writer’s most celebrated novel, “The Master,” recreated Henry James in a wry imitation of James’s own style. But that was a literary transformation of studied subtlety. Now that Toibin has moved on to a Master even more revered, he’s tearing out rooms and replacing the furniture. Anyone familiar with the Gospels will find this novella a foreign, unsettling place.“The Testament of Mary” was originally presented as a monologue, first performed last year in Dublin, and the story still shows the imprint of that form: It’s dramatic and poetic rather than analytical and expansive. And it’s not so much a testament of faith as a confession of guilt. There is no Pieta in these pages, except as a mournful dream. Spooked by the guards, this Mary abandoned her suffering son on the cross and took off to save her own skin. Latter-day efforts by Paul & Co. to transfigure his death into something divinely necessary strike her as obscene.

Read complete story

Barbara L.

First off I had my launch which was also the opening event for the Dundee Literary Festival. It was so amazingly gratifying to finally have the book in my hand (although I had to borrow my sister’s copy to read from as my copies hadn’t arrived!) and have a captive audience there to lsiten to it. There was a great turn out and the stock that Waterstone’s Dundee had in actually sold out. Nice feeling. The feedback from people has been great so far, but I’m still waiting to see an “official” review.

Then we were into the Literary Festival which saw many fabulous literary stars appear in Dundee. Highlights for me were definitely hearing Bernard MacLaverty and Colm Toibin read and meeting Iain Banks (I couldn’t go in to his event, but he held my taxi door open for me afterwards and I got a bit starry eyed, I mean, come on, The Wasp Factory!!!). All three were so friendly and enthusiastic and the readings I heard were amazing. I’ve taught several stories by Bernard MacLaverty in schools and it was lovely to hear him read. Colm Toibin was a gem as well and his talk was far ranging and clever, but funny too. All of them are real literary heavyweights (horrible term) and it was an absolute pleasure to meet them as I’m just starting out on my writing career.

In the middle of the Dundee Festival I popped down to Edinburgh to read at an event at the Wordpower Radical Book Festival with Kirsty Gunn. Kirsty spoke about new ways of reading and I read a bit (but not in an innovative way) and we answered a few questions and I was doing something that real writers do. I was actually sitting up there, reading from my actual book, people were listening enough to ask pertinent questions and I was able to answer them. Totally satisfying.

Then I came home and did some washing and real life resumed. As it does. And I’m still sending out book related emails, setting up events and thinking of ways to get my book out in the world as well as looking after the children, earning money in a variety of part time jobs, thinking of ways to bring down the  patriarchy, reading as many books as I can manage etc. etc.

So for now, I’m going to make some tea and think about maybe trying to write something.

Or alternatively, I may lay my head down on the table and just have a quick nap.

Roger Daltrey as Macheath (Sheppard) singing a rousing Handelian drinking song (1987 Jonathan Miller’s production of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera)

Dear friends and readers,

We returned from the East Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies conference late Saturday night. I found it rejuvenating — there may be in the world a set of people as enthusiastic over 18th century studies, but surely nowhere is any group more devoted.

The topic for the conference was “What does infamy matter — when you get to keep your fortune” [Juvenal], but of course not everyone does. I had not realized what a fruitful angle this could be until I came to listen to the papers. This was not the emphasis of the papers, but it seems to me a craving for money and all it can buy of luxury, and for respect and all it can gratify of pride and self-esteem were primary motivations leading to the infamy all figures I heard about the first day of the conference endured when they failed, perhaps kept failing, and then tried and tried again. Chance and and the changes of times then wove the kind of curtain or exit each won when they grew old and/or died. This does not cover all cases: women become infamous if they lose their virginity or chastity in an socially unacceptable way. Sometimes people can courageously defy a powerful man and yet not he but they become infamous.

For the 2nd part click here.

**********************

Typical vision of a period trial: the seven bishops at trial

Three superb papers in the first session on Friday morning: “Infamous Conduct: Treason, Bigamy and Escape Artistry.” The chair was Jack Fruchtman. In these three cases (as in a couple of others) I offer more detail than I have of late or I do of the others because the papers offered in the first session had such interesting and (to me) new content, but it should not be taken that I’ve gotten the whole of these papers; these are just outlines where I omit much detail, nuance, and post-modern and other arguments.

Jane Wessel spoke on the trial of the 7 bishops. A man could be hung, drawn, and quartered for performing a seditious text in 1688. In 1687 James II suspended the penal laws against Catholics, and debates everywhere (public, private, at work) ensued whether he had the right to do so. James then asked that clergy and bishops read his proclamation;’ in May 1688 the bishops in effect declared that the king had not the right unitaterally to impose tolerance and suspend the penal laws for Catholics. The clergy did not want to read this petition because that was tantamount to saying they approved (they did not).

Well, the bishops had been foolish enough to show up at James’s request to talk to him. It seems the two sides had been alone. James then had them indited for a misdemeanor. The bishops themselves did not publish their petition, but it quickly appeared and no one could say how or who was responsible. So the prosecution focused on publication: they argued that the act of writing was itself a form of publication, writing an armed act of rebellion, a violent act. The defense rejoined that a peer of the realm could not be brought to trial for a misdemeanor.

The prosecution was unsuccessful when the justices could not come to a decision and the jury were appealed to. So the prosecution tried again; a new inditement accused the bishops of “vi et armis.” One of the peers who challenged this was Heneage Finch, later 4th early of Winchilsea (Anne Finch’s husband); a state of mind was not treason. Again the prosecution countered that the Anglican church had a doctrine of passive obedience; writing was active rebellion. Justices split and jury again ruled in bishops’ favor.

This case bring before us the interrelationship of publishing, writing, political engagement with and without arms. The trial transcript was printed, and was over 100 pages.

Barbara Villiers Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland (1640-1709)

Ashley Shoppe discussed the liaison and marriage of Robert (Beau) Fielding to Barbara Villiers, Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland and Castlemaine. Fielding was nearly allied to some powerful people, and he inherited a fortune from his father-in-law. He proceeded though to squander it, and from then on made a career for himself by marrying rich older women. She was 65 when they married; she demanded a divorce and got it pronta. It was on Nov 25th that they married. Meanwhile much earlier Fielding had tried to marry another woman for money and instead ended up marrying Mary Wadsworth. He was before this involved with Anne de Laure. The time together and part included brutal beating by Fielding of Cleveland, emotional humiliation, assault. He was imprisoned as a Jacobite though he had not involved himself in politics. In 1706 Fielding was found guilty of bigamy, which carried a death penalty. Nothing like it was ever inflicted. It should be noted that Fielding and Cleveland later reconciled themselves to one another. It’s important to remember that Cleveland could have had children but apparently did not.

Two popular memoirs were printed not that long after:one memoir defended her as an upper class woman and therefore allowed; Henry is someone who is used to watching his wife flirt and more with his friends and brothers. The other condemned her a worse than useless aristocrat; it has Steele in it as someone who acted out of individual desire and that the reader should emulate his actions.

The one by Richard Steele lampooned Fielding as Orlando the Fair and ridiculed both people, showing real disdain for aristocratic corruption. Steele is criticizing the Tories and that Fielding was mad. Steele was an orientalist and applied sexualized imagery to Valeria. In this tale the seraglio exercises a fascination, and the Stuart abuse of power roundly criticized. His usage of Cleveland is called barbarous; and he is presented as effeminate, ridiculous.

Latude memoirs

Michael J. Mulryn delivered the last paper. Jean Henri de Latude was a man who achieved notoriety by his many escapes from prison, the persecution (as he felt it) from the Marquise de Pompadour armed with an initial lettre de cachet. She had gained power first as the king’s mistress and then as the woman who organized his seraglio and saw to his every need. Today she has been given a positive press as a patroness of the arts. Latude has been depicted as a con artist and madman; he depicted himself as a victim of the excesses of the ancien regime. His Memoirs were popular, and part of the anti-Bastille literature. (One should remember there were people who supported the lettre de cachet system and Bastille, e.g., Sade’s mother-in-law.) The Bastille was stormed to get arms.

Who was he? A fast-talking “Houdini” who eventually had 4 aliases, and could talk himself into and out of situations; he had been the illegitimate child of a domestic servant, and so could not inherit anything. He decided to tell the Marquise of a plot to assassinate her and threaten her that if she did not pay him, the plot would go through. She did fear assassination and put him in prison. Probably this plot was a bunch of lies.

He then (like Sade) spent many years in prison; he became famous for his extraordinary escapes but would be brought back. One of the most famous occurred in the Bastille, notoriously difficult to get out of. This escape included building a ladder, climbing chimneys, getting past grates and sentries, hours spent in a frozen moat. He was helped by a friend, a famous engineer, who organized the escape and he ended up in Charenton. He said he’d rather die than write a letter of apology to the Marquise. He claimed she cast spells on him. In 1777 the Charenton monks at Charenton helped him to escape but when he got out on the streets he mugged someone. One of his re-arrests occurred in Holland in 1756 when he cashed a letter of exchange sent him by his mother. The Marquise herself kept hunting him down, using the state’s resources for this. At last he ended in one of the worst prisons, meant for ordinary people (no gentlemen), where he somehow managed to write copiously (he would use his own blood it’s said).

His Memoirs were then transferred to someone outside the prison and in 1784 published. Many people sympathized and came to his defense; Louis XVI revoked the original lettre de cachet and he was freed. Later in life he dined with celebrities like Thomas Jefferson. After the demolition of the Bastille he was paraded through the streets like a revolutionary hero. Stories of all sorts were printed and it is very hard to distinguish fact from fiction. One historian, Brentano, wrote a tract on behalf of the gov’t; another defended Latude who could present himself as a gentleman. It is possible he was simply a clever common criminal. He was probably emotionally disturbed; his father never would recognize him. Towards the end of his life he had a pension and lived in a lovely apartment.

Then we had a lively question-and-answer period. Someone asked where do the trial transcripts of the Fielding-Cleveland case come from? Ms Wessel said the state published them after the “glorious revolution” (James II ousted); the 1706-7 Memoir is a 9 page cheap publication; Lawrence Stone told the story and there was a popular biography in the 1980s. Someone else was surprised that the King met the bishops alone and had himself insisted on the interview. What went on in the bigamy trial itself? Fielding tried to insert his marriage to Mary Wadsworth and was able to use benefit of clergy to avoid execution. I asked if the brutality he displayed at all influenced the outcome and she said it’s hard to know. A final set of questions were about Latude. Mr Murphy suggested that Latude had a grandiose view of himself, that he never was a loner type. What is telling is how quickly the Marquise could enlist the state apparatus and spies to locate Latude and extradite him from Holland.

It seemed to be felt by everyone that the way the powerful king, the lawyers, and the 7 bishops behaved and the stories of Latude and Pompadour had parallels to our own era of eroding civil rights, and how cases prosecuting whistle-blowers and so-called terrorists show the same avoidance of central issues to argue small points to get the case thrown out of court, the same use of harassing hounding police forces and state apparatus. The class parallels: upper class people are allowed; or upper class people are drones. I see a parallel in the Fielding case in that he was let off and had been so treacherous and brutal to the women he preyed upon.

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Sir John Hill (1716-75) where he’s called a botanist and that his “provocative and scurrilous writings involved him in many quarrels, both in the field of science and that of literature.”

Mid-morning we listened to George Rousseau’s plenary lecture on John Hill; this session and a reception later on were really book launches. As Mr Rousseau’s was a talk and included many anecdotes about himself, the Royal Society (he’s a fellow), and the people he’s known, I omit much only bringing in what seems to me might be of interest about Hill and the book. Mr Rousseau’s salient idea is that Hill sought celebrity as a way of getting money; that he was socially a borderline personality, often “badly behaved,” an outsider whose untamed genius led him to offend and outrage all sorts of people so he was continually changing professions or simply involved himself in many areas of life so that he can function as a sort of “filter” or mirror which manifests central aspects of 18th century life. To me Hill seemed a polymath.

Among the stories told were how Hill was blackballed three times by someone in the Royal Society and so Hill never was a member. He was the 2nd son of a clergyman who owned more than 100 books and taught the boy himself (including Greek, Latin, science). His employers included Stukeley (who uncovered Stonehenge); his patrons included the Earl of Richmond, a man living on a cosmopolitan estate, Goodwood, where a highly cultured informal community interacted; Emmanuel de Costa was a geologist and friend whom Hill betrayed by plagiarizing Costa’s research, but then de Costa embezzled funds from the Royal Society and went to prison for this. Hill went after Christopher Smart and was badly behaved to Garrick. Through Hill’s connection with Bute (see below) and Linneaus Hill was knighted. One he tried to fake his own death.

Hill’s writing was enormously varied and continual: like a Grub Street denizen he wrote around the clock to make money, scandal chronicles, early fiction, science, operas, farces, routs (perhaps as many as 200 works). He paid 50£ to get a certificate as a physician; he began a newspaper with Ralph Griffiths called The Daily Advertiser where Hill wrote twice-weekly columns where he made 1500£ a year. He wrote on reproductive science, a treatise on tobacco which correlates it to cancer. Angry that he never got into the Royal Society, he wrote a prose satire about it which like the Dunciad degrades people and names names. Lord Bute, George III’s tutor became a friend, both loved botany and Hill functioned as a master gardener and then published a huge work on vegetables.

Among those who drew or painted him was Allan Ramsay when Hill was 37. Hill married twice, the first time to the daughter of Earl of Burlington, she died early. He then remarried the Viscountess Ranelagh with whom he had 10 children; 6 survived

Mr Rousseau did not seem to like Hill very much, nor be sympathetic. He assumed that his audience would not care for Hill either. In the question-and-answer period someone seemed to suggest perhaps Hill was really most driven into extremes by a need for money. For my part the portrait as presented prompted some empathy nonetheless. I liked Hill for his reactive defiance and anger and non-conformity, counter-productive though some may find it.

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Mary Robinson at the height of her beauty as painted by Joshua Reynolds

After lunch, I went to two sessions, and heard five papers altogether. In the first session, Caroline Breashears’s “Secret and Celebrated: Life-Writings by and About Notorious Figures” Ellen Malenas Ledoux’s on Mary Robinson’s Memoirs, was on the now familiar material of a subjective reading of the actress’s images: did Robinson invite interviews half-undressed and breast-feeding and chose the peculiar format of her memoir, 3/4s written by a pious daughter in order to frame herself as good mother to exonerate herself from the infamy of having been the prince regent’s mistress or was she titillating her reader.

Jonathan Wild (1683-1725) in his prison (1725)

Jack Sheppard (1702-24) just before he was executed as drawn by John Thornhill

Peter Staffel’s paper presented Wild in four ways: what we can know of his life, how he is presented by Defoe, John Gay, and finally Fielding. Wild was a highly successful cutthroat businessman type who as first someone in the prison and then a fence-receiver and thief-taker governed a ring of associates, cunning and cruel, he was unable to recognize the resentment and angers of others (e.g., Sheppard), and himself was terrified of execution and tried to kill himself by poison in order to avoid the abuse (physical too) of the hanging scene. His grave was in fact robbed and the body stolen 3 days later — perhaps by people fascinated by him who thought they could learn about his brain this way. As with Michael Murphy, Mr Staffel showed us the difference between what we know of the actual facts of the man’s ilfe and character, the writer’s texts, and various legends.

One question was how did he achieve such notoriety? Prison had been a step up for him, a place he could organize from, terrible though such places were and despised the people in them in this era, with incarceration not seen as a punishment, but a period of waiting either to be freed or murdered by the state apparatus. Wild became Mary Melliner’s lover, herself an effective brothel madam there; he learned a lot from Hitchen, a master in Newgate and the Old Bailey. Wild kept a ledger, had stolen goods to offer others, was a good interviewer of people, could extract high fees and recognized strong desires for given things and manipulated this into high fees.

Isla Mair as Jenny Diver (Mary Melliner? the 1987 Beggar’s Opera)

We didn’t talk very much about the three texts, all of which are read today, nor was there any time to go into the different realizations of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, out of Gay, as black farce (Bertold Brecht), as opera (Benjamin Britten). I found myself remembering how Jonathan Miller in a brilliant BBC production in 1987 aided by theatrically effective actors turned the comic material into invigorating satiric bleak tragedy by its close. More interesting perhaps how certain characters and details Mr Staffel had mentioned still turn up in this production

Patricia Routledge and Stratford Johns as Mr And Mrs Peachum (1987 Beggar’s Opera) pour over those central ledgers

For the last session of the day, Eleanor Shevlin’s “Book History, Bibliography and Textual Studies” see comments.

Ellen

Speaking of which (dazzling segues are a personal speciality of mine) it’s religion that prompts his latest novel, The Testament of Mary, which is due out on bookshelves real and virtual on November 13^th and has already been the subject of some advanced gossip of the “major prizes” variety.

In between working on novels, short stories, essays, literary critiques, creative writing workshops and a lot more besides, Tóibín pops up with incredible regularity on the airwaves and he checked in with the BBC’s equivalent, The Front Row, the other night.

Here’s what he had to say about finding a tone of voice for history’s most famous mother:

I had to find a language for her. I couldn’t give her a mere domestic language of the ordinary day. I had to find a very heightened and stilted tone for her so that she wouldn’t speak like someone you meet on the street.

Tóibín also suggested that a continent-wide cultural freedom gave him the leeway to approach a subject as potentially controversial as a first-person narrative from the point of view of the Mother of God:

Being Irish, I’m very pro-European. I believe that Europe is not merely an economy as it’s being reduced to at the moment, but it’s a culture, and that one of the absolute tenets of that culture is the freedom of writers to imagine and publish.

I’m not so sure. A European artistic freedom hasn’t exactly been apparent for British Muslim novelists or Danish political cartoonists.

Listen to the full interview on the BBC’s Front Row page.

(P.S. Maybe I’m easily entertained but given all that talk of religions and freedoms I thought it was interesting that spellchecker’s suggested replacement for “Tóibín” is “Taliban”)

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More quotations about writing to inspire and encourage, chastise and giddy us up.

120)   Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.   (Joyce Carole Oats)

121)    Don’t just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.  (PD James)

122)   Plot springs from character… I’ve always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they’re about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don’t type.   (Anne Lamott)

123)  I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.  (G.K.Chesterton) 

124)   Finish everything you start.   Get on with it.   Stay in your mental pyjamas all day. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working. If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.  (Colm Toibin)

Irish writer Colm Tóibín has earned nearly every moniker a man of letters can hold: novelist, poet, playwright, journalist, critic, essayist, and even travel writer. His fiction includes the novels Brooklyn and The Master, and his nonfiction ranges from essays on Henry James to musings on the families of writers in New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Tóibín’s latest project covers hallowed ground, where few are brave enough to tread. His novella, The Testament of Mary, is told from the perspective of Jesus’s mother. Elderly and near the end of her life, she reflects on her son’s legacy at the dawn of Christianity. Tóibín shares with Goodreads his top five novels that use fiction to explore the lives of spiritual icons.

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• Disgrace by JM Coetzee
• Holding The Man by Timothy Conigrove
• The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin
• Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Riders by Tim Winton
• Last Orders by Graham Swift
• Eminence by Morris West
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishigo
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Twenty-three things these books have in common (and I’ve been thinking about this for ages, years really, and for a long long time I had this list up on my wall and I’d add to it and take things off until now I think it might actually mean something):

1. They’re all late twentieth-century literature
2. They’re all set in relatively contemporary times (i.e. 1980s and beyond), except, perhaps, Brokeback Mountain, In Cold Blood, The Remains of the Day
3. The main characters are all men, except those in The Blackwater Lightship
4. They’re all written by men, except Brokeback Mountain
5. They’re all about men, even The Blackwater Lightship in a roundabout way
6. The writers are all Caucasian, except Kazuo Ishigo
7. They’re all fiction, except In Cold Blood and Holding the Man
8. They’re all set in the Western World
9. They’re all dramas
10. Only one of them is gay-lit per se: Holding the Man
11. Most of the main characters have clear occupations: academic, schoolboy, cowboy, butler, priest
12. They all understand their political context
13. They all ask questions about nationhood, except The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
14. The passage and complexity of time is very important to them
15. Family – in the broadest sense – is at their heart
16. They all have strong senses of place
17. Apart from Brokeback Mountain, they’re all single point-of-view narratives – simple
18. They’re also all relatively straight-forward in terms of structure, but they lead the reader into tough and dark terrain: murder, mental illness, racism, religion, homophobia, right-wing ideologies, death, grief, the weight of history…but there’s also a whole lot of love
19. They’re all driven by clear ‘what ifs’ e.g. Eminence: what if the Pope-in-waiting was in fact an atheist
20. The prose is accessible, sometimes understated, but always beautiful
21. The writers appear to be burning to find something out through the writing of their works
22. There’s an overt sense of warmth and humanity – this is their true power
23. My life would be less without them

With a mind as formidable as his features, Colm Tóibín is now firmly a part of Ireland’s literary landscape. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

By Nigel Farndale

His manner, if not his appearance, is friendly and humorous. It’s his formidable bald head that makes him look, as he puts it “severe”. That and his dark clumps of eyebrow and the deep, ventriloquist’s dummy creases that frame his mouth. Given that he describes things for a living, I ask him how he would describe himself. “I have no sense of it at all. None. None.”

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