In her entry for 25th October, Mary Ann changes her spelling from “Gerebzow” to “Gerebsow”. The earlier spelling didn’t produce much when googling, but “Gerebsow” turned up a document describing Henry James’s stay at the same house only 3 years later (1855).

It is only very recently that I have got my boys placed en pension,
and find myself honestly at liberty to begin epistolating . . . We are
occupying an apartment of five or six beautiful rooms in the villa or
as villas are called in these parts, Campagne Gerebsow: a lovely place
within a stone’s throw almost of Geneva, with grounds running down
to the junction of the Arve and the Rhone, and commanding a very
satisfactory view of Mont Blanc. My bedroom windows open full upon
his majestic brow, and as I unclose them in the morning to inhale
the delicious breath of the orange-blossoms which whiten our garden,
night-cap nods to night-cap with the friendliest recognition. Such a
snowy, spotless cap as the old fellow wears, to be sure! How it glistens
in the morning sun, as no blanchtsseuse here below can ever hope to
make mine glisten! We pay at the Campagne Gerebsow but this is
the dear season ten dollars a week, and we live in far more comfort
than we have ever before enjoyed out of our own house. The table
is ample without being luxurious, and the cooking entirely comme il faut.
Our landlady moreover is a genuine lady, as motherly and human as
though our tie was one of friendship instead of francs, bestowing every
graceful and unstinted courtesy upon us through the day, and treating
us at night to the most exquisite morceaux to be culled from the musical
repertories of Italy and Germany.

The
villa was situated on a large triangular property, bordered by Rue des
Charmilles, Avenue d’Aire, and the Rhone. It was demolished in
1949 to make way for apartment houses which now line Rue des
Treize-Arbres. In 1855, the site was surrounded by fields and ravines,
running down to the river. The property was not yet marred by the
railroad which was cut through that section of Geneva’s suburbs in
1857. The villa was typical of the Genevese tradition of country
houses, with many generous-sized, high-ceiling rooms, great hall-
ways, balconies and terraces, all constructed solidly, with a certain
formal air, yet with an eye to comfort and gracious living.

The landlady was no ordinary person, being the Countess Maria
Amelia Hofrichter Gerebsow, a Viennese who had married a Rus-
sian colonel, Count Alexandre de Gerebsow. Financial difficulties
had forced them to share their villa with paying guests and the
James family occupied five or six rooms with splendid views of the
estate and Mont Blanc. Their meals were served in the large dining
room over-looking the gardens, and in the evening in the salon their
hostess entertained them with music and conversation.

~~~~~

“It’s time to start living the life
you’ve imagined”
- Henry James

~~~~~~

Part 1

Part 2

MY FOUR FAVORITE NEW BOOKS OF 2009, CONT’D

#3.

Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press, 2009)

I was keen to read this book since stumbling across an advance excerpt in some journal or other (I forget which now). That piece (Chapter 23, “Location”) struck me as not only an amazing bit of biography (offering a revelatory account of Barthelme’s life in New York in the autumn of 1962, when he worked for Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess as the managing editor of the short-lived magazine Location), but also a terrific work of literary criticism. For example, Daugherty reveals that a small passage of the story “A Shower of Gold” (“the typewriter in front of the Olivetti showroom on Fifth Avenue”) has its basis in walks that Barthelme took at the time. Daugherty argues: “What in later years some reviewers and critics would call Don’s ‘absurdity’ was simply alertness and wonder on the streets.” Later on, he demonstrates the extent to which Barthelme’s story “The Viennese Opera Ball” is not only a rewrite of a passage in Henry James’s The American Scene, but also cribs heavily from a Time magazine fashion article: “[Barthelme] saw how the fashion article illustrated James’s theme—how, more than ever, James’s theme was current. Rather than commenting on this, Don produced a collage that demonstrated it.”

This is heady stuff to a Donald Barthelme fanatic—brilliant, even. And to my great delight, the entire book is comprised of meticulous biographical details and related close readings.

For instance, Daugherty seems to know every book that Barthelme ever read, and when he read it. (See, for instance, his accounts of Barthelme’s reading habits during his stint in the Army in Korea.) More importantly, he sees the influences that those authors had:

Like millions of Catholic boys in the 1940s, Don carried a little green book around school: the Baltimore Catechism, a manual of Catholic teaching first published in 1885, which contained hundreds of questions and answers. […]

Q. What is man?

A. Man is a creature comprised of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.

Q. Why do many marriages prove unhappy?

A. Many marriages prove unhappy because they are entered into hastily and without worthy motives.

[…] Don could not resist mocking such language, both as a schoolboy and later as a mature writer. The Q & A format would become one of his signature styles, in stories like “The Explanation,” “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,” “Basil from Her Garden,” and others.

A few pages later, Daugherty notes Frank Sullivan’s own distinctive use of the Q & A format in The New Yorker, in his Mr. Arbuthnot “testimonies”:

Q– Could the atomic age have arrived by any means of any other verb than “usher”?

A– No. “Usher” has the priority.

Q– Mr. Arbuthnot, what will never be the same?

A– The world.

Q– Are you pleased?

A– I don’t know.

Daugherty also sees a great influence in Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1933, English trans. 1950), a present the author received from his father while in college.

Fortunately, the more that Daugherty reveals Barthelme’s sources and working methods, the more intriguing his subject grows. For one thing, it advances readings of Barthelme and his work beyond the typically vague—and by now predictable—generalizations that he was “a postmodernist.”

Shya Scanlon recently wrote about different ways we might classify authors, mentioning that we can group them according to whom they’re “in conversation with.” One of Daugherty’s more intriguing arguments in Hiding Man is that Barthelme was less a postmodernist (and certainly less a “Black Humorist,” as he was also labeled at the time) than he was a unique amalgamation of mid-1800s Paris Romantic (think Rimbaud, Courbet, Daumier) translated into English by way of American iconoclasts like James Thurber and S.J. Perelman (Barthelme’s devotion to their work going a long way toward explaining his lifelong relationship with The New Yorker). That is to say, late Romantic urban utopians and persnickety American satirists were the authors whom Barthelme was in conversation with—they constituted the tradition that he chose to enter. (Daugherty observes that Barthelme put Rimbaud at the top of a “reading list for young writers,” alongside Beckett, Joyce, and Kafka.)

It’s not my place to judge whether Daugherty’s right, or how his arguments will or won’t alter Donald Barthelme’s legacy (I am not a Barthelme scholar). However, I can speak as a great Donald Barthelme fan—and I was amazed. Since reading Hiding Man I’ve returned to the work of one of my earliest writing heroes with fresh eyes, and found the stories richer and more provocative than at any time since I first encountered them. Would that more literary biographies were so thorough, so passionate, and so revelatory.

Tomorrow: Book #4.

Fiction writer David Jauss analyzes Chekhov’s endings and explains why they were revolutionary at the time — and what we can learn from them today:

Early in his writing life, Anton Chekhov became convinced that new kinds of endings were necessary in literature.  While writing Ivanov, his first major play, he complained to his publisher about conventional endings—“Either the hero gets married or shoots himself”—and concluded, “Whoever discovers new endings for plays will open up a new era.”  And that is exactly what Chekhov did, both for plays and for short stories.  Even now, more than a hundred years after his death, we are still very much in the era Chekhov opened up.  Chekhovian endings have been adopted, and adapted, not only by the usual suspects — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus, Tobias Wolff — but also by such otherwise un-Chekhovian writers as Donald Barthelme and John Barth.

Whereas most fiction, past and present, focuses on a character’s climactic change, Chekhov’s stories are frequently less about change than they are about the failure to change.  And even when his characters do change, their changes fail to last, merely complicate the existing conflict, or create a new and often greater conflict.  His endings tend to emphasize the continuation of conflict, not its conclusion.  Chekhov commented on this fact in one of his letters, saying, “When I am finished with my characters, I like to return them to life.” A great number of Chekhov’s stories end by saying implicitly what one story says explicitly: “And after that life went on as before.”

But for all of their apparent inconclusiveness, his stories do have endings; they’re just not the kind of endings favored by previous writers.  They are subversive endings, endings designed to undercut our expectations and, thereby, force us to examine our conceptions about life and human nature.

In an article forthcoming in 2010 in The Writer’s Chronicle, I discuss a dozen ways Chekhov subverted traditional short story endings.  Here are three of them:

1) Anti-epilogues

Like Henry James, who complained that epilogues were characterized by “a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks,” Chekhov despised such endings.  Many of his stories end by simply denying the very premise of an epilogue: the possibility of knowing what the future might hold.  Instead of giving us a pat account of how everything will turn out, he typically returns the character, and us, to the uncertainty of life, leaving us wondering what will happen next.

The fact that these endings leave his characters’ future fates open suggest that, although Chekhov was generally pessimistic about the possibility of change, he was also aware that sometimes lives change in dramatic and unpredictable ways.  Chekhov makes this point explicitly in “A Story Without an End.”  The narrator of this story—who is not-so-coincidentally a writer of short stories—presents two portraits of his neighbor, the first showing him as he was a year before, after his wife died and he attempted suicide, and the second showing him now, playing the piano and singing and laughing with a group of ladies in the narrator’s drawing-room.  Witnessing this change, which he compares to “the transmutation of substances,” leads the narrator to realize the impossibility of predicting what his neighbor’s future life will be like.  Thus, this story without an end ends with the unanswered question, “How will it end?”

2.  Reverse Epilogues

Instead of ending with a reference to an unknown future, a “reverse epilogue” ends with a reference to the known past. “The Chorus Girl” exemplifies this mode of closure.  In this story, a chorus girl named Pasha is confronted by the wife of a man with whom she’s been sleeping.  While the husband listens in the next room, the wife badgers Pasha into giving her jewelry that she wrongly believes her husband has given Pasha.  After the wife leaves, the husband returns and says, “My God, a decent, proud, pure being like that was even prepared to kneel down before this . . . this whore!  And I brought her to it!  I let it happen!”  He pushes Pasha roughly aside, saying, “Get away from me, you—you trash!”  Pasha starts to sob.

Since the story begins years after this scene, which is presented as an extended flashback, we expect what follows to “resolve” the flashback and inform us how the man’s cruelty affected Pasha’s future.   But instead Chekhov abruptly segues into her past.  The final sentence reads, “She remembered how three years ago, for no rhyme or reason, a merchant had giving her a beating, and sobbed even louder.”  By moving backward in time, Chekhov implies that she has been mistreated by men repeatedly throughout her life and that this pattern has continued after this event and will continue on into the future.

3.  External Climaxes

Chekhov sometimes omits climaxes in order to make the reader have an epiphany his protagonist fails to have.  A character may reach a “dead end,” in short, but the reader continues the journey in the character’s stead.  I suspect that behind this kind of ending, which we find most frequently in Chekhov’s later work, is the belief that an epiphany is more powerful if the reader experiences it rather than merely witnesses it.

One way Chekhov creates an external climax is through the use of an unreliable narrator, one who fails to see what his story reveals about him.  In “The Little Joke,” for example, the narrator recounts a “joke” he played on a woman who loved him, a joke he cannot understand—but we can, and do.  He tells of tobogganing with this woman and how, as they roared down the hill with the wind in their face, he whispered, “I love you” into her ear, then pretended he had said nothing, so she could not be sure if what she heard had been his voice or the wind.  She was terrified of tobogganing, yet kept on doing it—and even once went by herself—to see if she would hear those words.  The story ends: “And now that I am older, I cannot understand why I said those words, why I played that joke on her . . .”  The reader realizes that he actually did love the woman and that, despite his refusal to face the facts of his own emotions, he regrets playing the joke and losing his one chance at love.  And the reader also realizes that the joke was ultimately a big one, not a little one, and that it was on him, not her.

***

Virginia Woolf has described the effects of these inconclusive endings better, perhaps, than anyone.  When we finish a Chekhov story, she says, we feel “as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it.”  But, she goes on to say, the more we become accustomed to his work, the more we are able to hear the subtle music of Chekhov’s meaning and the more the traditional conclusions of fiction—“the general tidying up of the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously trumpeted forth”—“fade into thin air” and “show like transparencies with a light behind them—gaudy, glaring, superficial.”  His endings, she concludes, “never manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous, agreeable to our vanity,” and therefore, “as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens; the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.”

David Jauss’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and been reprinted in Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; Best Stories from the First 25 Years of the Pushcart Prize; The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002; and elsewhere. The recipient of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, the Fleur-de-Lis Poetry Prize, a NEA Fellowship, and a James A. Michener Fellowship, among other awards, he served as fiction editor of Crazyhorse for ten years and now teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Mama is a humorous ghost who floats about the house in long, white cotton nightgowns dotted with blue flowers. No longer working crosswords, no longer playing solitaire on a sheet of cardboard perched upon her knees, she drifts like that woman haunting an estate in The Innocents, the 1961 year-of-my-birth movie with Deborah Kerr that is based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. You see the hem of a gown turn a corner then it’s gone.

I saw The Innocents as a small child in the 60’s. Truman Capote as one of the screenwriters lent the movie a southern gothic feel — like in his own first novella Other Voices, Other Rooms (with the creepy ending that involves a horse!). Then I guess due to legal issues it was shelved and could not be seen for decades! So, one year probably in the late 80’s I am sitting at a Secret Festival screening at the Seattle International Film Festival and what comes up all big and black and white and amazing? The Innocents.

The main use poetry in “The Use of Poetry” is seduction: specifically, the seduction of the liberal artist Maisie (recalling shades of Henry James: What did Maisie know?) by the scientist Michael Beard in the late 60s. Michael learns enough Milton to impress Maisie, with her artistic tendencies, a feat that I doubt I’d have the discipline for despite being another liberal artist; they go out, Michael realizes his disdain for what seems the foppish laziness of the liberal arts, and he reinforces the inferiority complex many English majors feel in the face of hard science.

Or maybe not: when we think we see Michael’s perspective on how easy it is to read “four of the best essays on Milton,” McEwan drops this in by airmail:

Many years later, Beard told this story and his conclusions to an English professor in Hong Kong, who said, “But, Michael, you’ve missed the point. If you had seduced ninety girls with ninety poets, one a week in a course of three academic years, and remembered them all at the end—the poets, I mean—and synthesized your reading into some kind of aesthetic overview, then you would have earned yourself a degree in English literature. But don’t pretend that it’s easy.”

That’s the only mention of the “English professor in Hong Kong,” who appears, nameless, only long enough to correct us. He or she disappears: there is no wrapping up, no coming together of the English professor and some deeper meaning. He or she is there to tell us, and “The Use of Poetry” seems like a rebuke to the “Show, don’t tell” school of writing: it is all telling, or nearly all, and it teasingly plays with real world correspondences. “The Use of Poetry” says:

This understanding was the mental equivalent of lifting very heavy weights—not possible at first attempt. He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week.

A February 2009 profile of McEwan, also in the New Yorker, says:

McEwan enjoyed studying calculus—“It was like trying to lift a weight that was a little too heavy”—but he settled on literature, and showed enough promise that he was urged to apply for a scholarship at Cambridge.

Maybe McEwan fears the limits of our cognition, or his own cognition. Or maybe I am engaging the intentional fallacy. Surely the editors of The New Yorker noticed this correspondence in their earlier nonfiction piece and this later work of fiction. What, if anything, did they make of it? Were they as uncertain as me?

Finally, what to make of the title: “The Use of Poetry,” rather than “uses?” Apparently poetry has only one use, seduction, as I unfairly said in the first line of this post. But maybe it is not asking, “What is poetry used for?” but rather, “how and why is poetry used by a particular person—Michael—or people in general?” The title probably has other meanings too, like most poems, with their rascally habit of evading a single interpretation.

For some reason, I am reminded of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: both that novel and this story are highly directive, allusive, focusing on what love means in a modern context, using love to examine ideas and ideas to examine love. They both end, not with a statement or feeling of wholeness, but with a feeling of new sight but perpetual incompleteness, like that is our fate, no matter the math we learn or the poems we study. Could “The Use of Poetry” be to remind us of what we can never fully grasp, like Michael trying to understand the liberal arts, or Milton, who was in turn trying to understand us? Hard to say. But then, a lot in life is hard to say. The best we can do with it is try. Maybe with a poem.

Or a story.

But it’s alright now, in fact it’s a gas
Jumping Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas

Today is the future you were dreaming of last year. Live all you can, it’s a mistake not to. If you don’t make it into tomorrow will you have enjoyed today?

I think I’m paraphrasing Henry James. In fact, I’m not even going to make high-brow literary allusions because that quote was sampled at the beginning of a Derrick Carter ‘Back to Basics’ Detroit house mix from the mid-90’s and all very jolly it was too, but the sentiment sticks. I read ‘The Ambassadors’ under duress and I’d swap it for Derrick Carter any day of the week.

The future dreamed about last year was all so different. There was breathless talk of a new start, a home, a dog walked through country fields, curling up in front of a fire in front of an old film. Everything I was told going to be amazing and, one was assured, forever.

With that sort of inside knowledge a man is quite rightly entitled to enter a casino, approach the roulette wheel, slam all the chips down on a call of red and laconically sit back to await the payout. Only it doesn’t come up red, but black. That’s quite a hit to take and, like every gambler, the real deal starts with getting into the shit and trying to work out a way of getting out of it only to end up in deeper shit and take more desperate measures.

This is the week that had it all. Some of us may be going to hell but we do so via heaven while on this mortal coil. Who wants heaven anyway? If they are to be believed its going to be full of Christians. And that, by definition, is hell. Perpetual Songs of Praise for eternity. So I win.

Lets not dwell on any particular incident of this week, but it moved at hyperspeed, has crises, Friday was exceptional, took no prisoners and suffice to say it ended with a stumble around Clapham in mid-morning heading towards Shepherds Bush feeling like this runaway train had, at last, hit the buffers. There was the minor matter of turning up at Loftus Road for my goddaughter’s appearance as a mascot at QPR – Middlesbrough.

As a general rule the public are best avoided. I’m sure the feeling toward myself is mutual. We simply don’t get on. Quite how I’ve garnered a career in public relations is baffling to me as I simply don’t relate to them. Therefore I had my head down in Westfield, refusing to react to individuals and couples who wear Santa hats whilst going about their shopping. What I didn’t expect was to be grabbed by a chintzy sales assistant who did the usual patter of ‘Can I ask you a question?’.

Why I responded in the affirmative, god only knows, fear probably, but that the question ‘Is there a special woman in your life?’ panicked me and that sort of curveball when I’m on hangover alert could be the beginning of a two hour intensive therapy session. What followed was a demonstration of a male nail and hand treatment.

Public displays of affection are one thing, but public displays of my being male groomed by a stranger is all too much. What is happening to civilisation these days that man can’t go curl up and die without being male groomed, having his private life upturned and then propositioned there and then by a random (‘Have you ever had an Israeli? – the sort of question that has an entire different meaning in the PLO) in the name of grooming?

I now return to this blog entry halfway through Sunday. If I thought the week couldn’t get any worse than a 5-1 home defeat at the Rangers (Flavio Briatore and I stormed out and charged down the stairs simultaneously and together in move that could have been choreographed), the Last One attempted to re-establish contact around midnight as I was dutifully writing this blog and cheerily swigging Rioja.

It was more than a pertinent reminder. With one single ping on MSN Messenger the week that had been teetering and swaying in the hurricane came crashing down.

Today is the future you were dreaming of last year. Yet, the beauty of ’social’ media is you don’t have to respond, you can stare at the screen, take a long drag on a cigarette, stub out the butt on the nearest available surface and retire to bed Alone maybe, but with your own free will to walk away. To the closure on a shocker and to the beginning of a new day.

The thing to remember is that everyone has a past, but not everyone has a future. The one I’m dreaming of next year is magnificent.

There are not, in the scheme of things, as it may have become apparent in my essay on Zadie Smith on essays the other week, that many writers one feels one can really trust. I mean, who just somehow more integrity than everybody else – who have a kind of purity or clarity about them and their endeavour.Who you know will never lead you astray, or down the garden path. Not very many at all. It seems my whole life has been a search for these people.

Clearly, regular readers will know by now that one of the writers I feel I can trust is my late teacher and friend Michael Donaghy, who among other things addressed this very issue of trust by saying that is why technical skill is so important – we were saying in poetry, gut it applies across the board. It’s one of the ways of establishing with the reader that you aren’t going to let them down. I never would have been his student in the first place if it hadn’t been for this relationship of trust built on the page; the rest was serendipity.

Another of course, who predates him in my reading life, is the Master himself, Henry James. The summer of 2004 was the summer of  novels about Henry James: remember? The one by David Lodge that just looked so spurious; The Line on Beauty, which featured James tangentially, and which I was halfway through reading when Donaghy died in the September, so I never finished it; and the one I did real all through, later, transfixed, as if my life was changing. (In fact, it was.) The Master, by Colm Toibin. A novelistic rendering of the life of James, incorporating words from the man and his associates, and a remarkable, kaleidoscopic, prismatic, and deeply moving work.

(My poem The Master and the Future, written in the voice of James and based on a line from his notebooks, had been written a year earlier, in July 2003, a little white elephant; but that summer I got it published, on the crest of a wave, and it won third prize in an Oxfam poetry competition.)

Well, there’s the background. So imagine the shock and happiness of clicking on a link recently and reading this, by Colm Toibin:

It was the Hay-on-Wye book festival in the early 1990s. I was wandering around the tents after my own event, wondering what else was on. The program that afternoon included a reading by two poets: one name I vaguely recognized, the other was new to me. As I passed that tent, I found that the poets were starting. I went and sat on my own at the back.

I know that I had not slept very well the night before and was slightly hungover; this may have meant that I was oddly more receptive to things, more open and vulnerable. But I am not sure. Whatever it was, the work of the poet whose name I had not known hit me with considerable emotional force. There was a mixture of playfulness and rhythmic intensity in the work, of an imagination held down by the discipline of stanza form and metre and fired up at the same time by the beauty of language and by life itself. The poet, I should add, was also very good-looking and had a soft American accent. He was fresh-faced and young, and seemed almost innocent. His name was Michael Donaghy.

One of his poems in particular had filled me with delight, especially a line in which “a nice distinction” had been changed by a saint “into an accordion.” After the reading, when I was getting a book signed by him, I mentioned this poem and must have seemed disappointed that it was not in a published volume yet. He said if I waited he would write it out in longhand for me. I waited behind and he did so. Later, back home, when I read it over and over, I loved it as much as I had when I heard it for the first time. It was called “Irena of Alexandria”:

Creator, thank You for humbling me.

Creator, who twice empowered me to change

a jackal to a saucer of milk,

a cloud of gnats into a chandelier,

and once, before the emperor’s astrologers,

a nice distinction into an accordion,

and back again, thank You

for choosing Irena to eclipse me.

…

This just seems to breathe life into Michael again. I feel as if I can hear him speak, reading this. Then Toibin talks about the Chicago Police Chief O’Neill, who collected Irish music and about whom Donaghy wrote; and “Phantom”, the long memorial poem in Don Paterson’s new collection, Rain. It’s all in a gorgeous-looking Canadian cultural magazine called  Brick. But of course, I’m useless. Because I was going to link it in September, and you could have read the extract from the article they had posted online. But I delayed and faffed, and wrote other things, and now the new issue is up and Toibin’s memoir is taken down.

But I wanted to share it with you – and you can buy the magazine. It’s gorgeous-looking and chock-full of goodness (see, using technical skill to win our trust). And failing even that, you can read the works of Colm Toibin, Michael Donaghy and Henry James. Or you could just leave a comment telling me how useless I am.

Reading is in serious trouble (we are in serious trouble). Right now I’m at a Borders bookstore. I see a lot of books. I see a lot of people. Many of the people I see here are using their computers solely, what with Border’s offering of free Wi-Fi. Others seem to walk into the store only to use their cell phones loudly and near me. Then they just kind of drift back out the front door.

NOBODY IS READING.

Much like a ringtone, this topic annoyed the shit out of me inside of Starbucks the other day. Cell phones are always at full mast there, although I do see some people reading from time to time. Their hands are usually free of heavy books, replaced with loose files and folders instead. They have a five-minute coffee, work on their company reports, and exchange brief, yet boisterous greetings to one another.

A cafe ought to be a place where one goes to relax and read for one’s own good or from one’s own ambition. These fools put the odd vision in my head of Dionysus dancing above the buildings of our age in suit and tie, encumbered by a briefcase.

There is, however, a much more startling trauma in and around pleasure reading. Go to a bookstore. Look around. The vampire section has taken over like a cancer. As if the kitsch that people write anyway wasn’t enough, now we have two million more crappy books about something stupid, none of which have much literary value. These books aren’t exactly bringing language, style, or form to any new heights. They bring them to the slums and abandon them there.

The line between pedant and philistine narrows and narrows.

I recommend going to Google Books. They have a massive selection of public domain books. You can download them for free, read them on your computer, or transfer them onto most e-readers. Here you can find anything from Carl Jung to Henry James.

Stephanie Meyer will never hit somebody like James Joyce or Dylan Thomas will. It’s like comparing rap music to Mozart, to be blunt. We need to pick up worthwhile material, read the Moderns. It’s time to abandon literature’s “rap music” and expand our minds with seraphic creation, before we find ourselves FUCKED.

I’ve been thinking about aprons lately. What they are, what they mean, what they look like and things like that. You may think this denotes the approach of mental enfeeblement on my part, and it could be so – but I’m enjoying it very much thank you!

Women in aprons are one thing, of course. And men in aprons are yet another. Whether we are all the same under the aprons is an idea available for musing upon, naturally.

I’ve been hanging around with a guy in an apron, at least on the pages of a book. Hyacinth of ‘The Princess Casamassima’ has been with me every night recently as my head hits the pillow before falling asleep. At this point, that translates to 447 pages of him – with still a bit to go till the story ends at page 591. Hyacinth wears an apron when he works as a fine bookbinder – and the aprons of his co-workers in the small shabby shop figure in the narrative which is supposedly about a princess but really about a short Englishman who is really a Frenchman in ways. But back to aprons!  Here are some to look at:

No aprons for cooking! That surprised me a bit. I think of cooking first, really, when I think of aprons.

“Pequeño tema inspirado en una conversación mantenida anoche con Lady Shrewshury, durante una cena en casa de Lady Lindsay – escribe Henry James en sus Notas el 18 de mayo de 1892 -: la mujer que de joven ha sido muy fea, por esa fealdad  ha sido desairada y humillada, y – como muy a menudo, o al menos a veces, suele ocurrir con las muchachas corrientes – en sus años maduros, y aun después, se vuelve mucho más agraciada, guapa incluso – y a consecuencia de ello encantadora, en todo caso, y atractiva -, de modo que los últimos años de vida le deparan el triunfo, la recompensa, la revanche. Idea de una mujer así que, en una situación semejante, encuentra a un hombre que cuando joven la despreció y humilló, que acaso rechazó el casamiento – un casamiento proyectado por ambas familias -, y que por torpeza, aun por fatuidad e insensatez, le dio a entender que era demasiado poco para él ….”.

Y así sigue Henry James, minucioso y en perfecta elaboración mental, el proyecto de su cuento titulado “La rueda del tiempo” que publicaría meses después. Estos son los “talleres” del novelista – talleres, pruebas, esbozos, planes, y también dudas e indecisiones – que ahora acaba felizmente de reeditar Destino bajo el título “Cuadernos de Notas (1878-1911)”. Los había leído hace años en la primera versión de Ediciones Península y siempre me sirvieron para entrar en esa cámara secreta de un creador, seguir su trayecto desde el momento en que coge al vuelo una idea (en una cena, por ejemplo) y va uniendo después los hilos de modo personal hasta que lo ajusta por completo en su mente y lo lleva al papel. James había señalado en el prólogo a su novela corta ”Las ruinas de Poynton” que sus historias nacían a menudo de una semilla “lanzada distraídamente” por algún compañero de cena, pero hacía hincapié en el hecho de que, si una fugaz sugerencia basta a veces para atizar la imaginación, cualquier exceso puede “echar a perder” la operación entera.

“Puesto que la vida – había dicho en ese prólogo – es toda inclusión y confusión, y el arte todo discriminación y selección, éste último, en busca del recio valor oculto que es el único que le concierne, olfatea la masa tan instintiva y certeramente como un perro que barrunta un hueso enterrado”. Además de “barruntar” ideas y situaciones que están ahí, flotando en el aire (como las “mariposas nocturnas” de Virginia Woolf), James buscaba igualmente, como tantos otros novelistas, las precisiones adecuadas a sus personajes. De ahí la lista de nombres y apellidos tomados de tantos sitios para bautizar a sus criaturas de ficcción. “Nombres - escribe James en sus “Cuadernos“ -: Gisborne -Dessin- Carden- Gent -Peregrine King (visto en The Times)”. Los toma de todas partes. Simenon se rodeaba de listas telefónicas de todos los países del mundo para ser certero en apellidos y en nombres. Hoy, tanto el creador de “Maigret” como el del “Retrato de una dama” lo resolverían en Internet.

“La única razón de existir de una novela - escribió Henry James en “El arte de la ficción” – es que ciertamente intenta representar la vida”.  La diferencia entre una buena y mala novela es que “la mala es arrojada con todas las telas embadurnadas y todo el mármol inutilizado hacia algún limbo no frecuentado, o algún basurero infinito debajo de las ventanas traseras del mundo, y la buena subsiste y emite su luz y estimula nuestro deseo de perfección”.

(Imágenes:- 1.- Henry James, por John Singer Sargent.-1913.-The Henry James Resource Center/ 2.- Henry James.-guardian.co.uk)

Last Thursday in my American Literature class I had to give a presentation on the novella “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James. I read it, didn’t quite understand it, did some outside research, pulled some quotes, and threw something together last minute. Most of what I discussed in my presentation was thematic, because that was the only thing I really understood. But after my presentation when the class discussion began, I really began to thoroughly understand the book and was actively engaged in the discussion unlike my usual stare-out-the-window-and-think-about-lunch routine.

But then something happened. My stupid professor, whom I hate, asked the class: “So, did you like it?”

A vocal minority said: “UGGGHHH NOOOOOOOO IT WAS SOOOO STUPID THE MAIN CHARACTER WAS SOOOO STUPID”

I died a little on the inside. This was a complicated book, the writing was very dense, the story was allegorical and sparse, but the characters were immensely complex. I was just beginning to make progress understanding their motivations that were buried deep within this surface-level narrative. Even now, writing this blog, I feel like I am understanding it more. I was even growing excited and inspired with every new insight, a sad rarity for me in this particular class. I had really missed this excited, inspired feeling as it usually only occurs when I listen to good, new music or see a terrific movie. It’s happened in English classes before, but it hasn’t for a while and I’ve been rethinking my major.

That feeling faltered with my classmates’ words, and I had to really think about why. I was upset with my professor with asking the question in the first place, and I REALLY had to think about why.

That was Thursday.

Then this happened:

Oh my god, what an original twist on Vampires! It started a vampire craze! What, Buff the Vampire Slayer was basically the same thing? But that was like... 10 years ago... so irrelevant

Let me preface this by saying that I have tried to read Twilight, as in I have opened the book and found its use of language innane and beneath me. Let me also say that I did watch the first movie. In fact, let me just say that Twilight intrigues me, period. I can’t read the books because I do not have the literacy of a middle schooler, and I can’t see the movie because I refuse to spend my money on a movie in a theatre unless I know it’s going to be good. But I really mean to emphasize this: I will not trash Twilight in every way, shape or form in this blog. I hope, as a matter of fact, to prove that “trashing” is irrelevant when it comes to art.

New Moon’s release reignited by interest in Twilight, as I’m sure it did for many others. But the reason why I am interested in Twilight seems to be a point to ponder. Much of the Twilight-mania seems to center on Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner’s pure attractiveness. In a similar vein to High School Musical, which purportedly re-popularized musicals among tweens when they would have paid to watch Zac Efron stand there, it could be true that it isn’t Twilight that’s popular, it’s R Patz. Now, I am a lesbian, and while I have adored Kristen Stewart’s work in Into the Wild and Speak, I don’t find physical attractiveness to be any incentive for obsessiveness.

Everything that I have gathered from my Twilight research has led me to interpret that the relationship between the two main characters is borderline emotional abuse. I would read the book before I would decide to cross out the “borderline” part. So I am also fascinated by why impressionable young girls would envy such a relationship. I won’t get into the reasons why I think all these things are the way they are. If you want to hear my reasons, maybe that’ll be for another blog. But my point is this:

Twilight’s existence forces me to ask questions, and it forces me to think. “The Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James also forced me to ask questions and made me think. Like or dislike is irrelevant. Twilight is a cultural phenomenon, and if we stopped rolling our eyes for two seconds we could discover some interesting things about adolescent sexuality or the definition of “love” in a nation with a 1 in 2 divorce rate. These subjects are worth discussing, and we should not let our cultural prejudices inhibit our quest for knowledge. And yes, as a liberal atheist indie stoner rocker, I have miles of cultural prejudices standing between me and Twilight. I would be a hypocrite if I chastised my fellow English-majors for letting their prejudices stand in the way of my newfound adoration for Henry James. I was just thinking about Henry James on a higher level.

Thinking has no relationship to liking or disliking.
What is interesting can be neither good nor bad.
Annoyance is the enemy of analysis.

So why was I so upset when my classmates trashed my new best friend, the fictional character John Marcher? I was just thinking! That’s what you do in college. I was being ambitious in my analysis, I skipped a few stairs as I ran for the door, I left some people in the dust. This happens so rarely that I didn’t know what to do. Usually it’s me that’s left in the dust, not understanding why people are so “INNN LOOOOVEE” with something.

Twilight the book was laughably written and the movie was just okay. This is my opinion. The relationship between the two main characters is very complex. This is a theory, that I could possibly back up with some facts.

Henry James is awesome. FACT

And he apparently died a virgin. Theory. That's sad. Opinion. And also very intersting... Fact

November 22, 2009

 Forty miles of running this week, and tomorrow I will make it fifty.  Stress is good for the running life.  I can feel stress in my neck like wicked thoughts in the back of your eyes, for those of you who have not had wicked thoughts that is where they lodge.  But right this minute, I am watching my iguana Giuseppe Verdi on the table, (he’s a green iguana!) eat leaf lettuce and my husband is reading Henry James.  For those of you who love James, I’m sorry for mentioning this, but James is a dipthong.  First of all, dipthong is a cool word, say it three times and think about it really hard and you’ll see what I mean.  Paul Bowles is an exclamation point.  Margaret Atwood is parentheses, Ursula LeGuin is a question mark, James is a dipthong.  My husband says James makes him want to take a nap, so he’s drinking a lot of coffee. 

People always act so constipated in James’ novels.  For god’s sake, do something! I want to yell at them. Have a brawl.   Get your teeth knocked out.  Kiss the lips, drink the brandy, then plow into whatever you’re going to do.  Oh, “The Heiress” where she just sits around in that house, and Portrait of a Lady, where she puts up with her husband, John Malcovich was so great, do something, and she was American!  I can see a British woman.  I guess American women get paralyzed sometimes too. 

 I had this conversation in Los Angeles once.  Woman sobbing, “I can’t leave him.  I just can’t, you don’t understand.  We have a Lear jet.  And everything else.  You understand?”  I kid you not.  She said this.  And I said…(My little blog reader… I never said I was perfect, now did I?  I wasn’t raised right… I didn’t go to therapy, and I did not get fixed.)  “Well, there is the Lear, that’s something.  I wouldn’t want to leave my Honda.”  And then I left.  You’re miserable I thought.  It’s things. Leave.  Paralysis is real.  It’s everywhere.  Even in this room.  I see my husband stumbling over the pages of James, and Verdi failing to finish his butter leaf lettuce.  It’s a problem.

Veja como “Dom Casmurro” se tornou um marco e entenda Machado de Assis; leia trecho de livro

da Folha Online

Escrito por um dos maiores especialistas brasileiros no assunto, o volume “Machado de Assis”, da coleção “Folha Explica”, da Publifolha, trata de toda a produção machadiana –romances, novelas, contos, crônicas, teatro e poesia. O primeiro capítulo pode ser lido abaixo.

Nota completa

Machado de Assis é considerado o melhor romancista brasileiro. E, à medida que a sua obra for traduzida para as principais línguas cultas, crescerá a probabilidade de seu nome incluir-se entre os maiores narradores do século 19. A sua estatura ombreia-se com a de alguns contemporâneos que alcançaram renome internacional: Zola, Maupassant, Verga, Eça de Queirós, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Tchekhov.

source: Pandora

From radio broadcasts around the U.K. and the Empire: bloopers, blunders, and embarrassment– all collected at RadioFail.

One should turn one’s volume up and consider, for example, this report of nuclear proliferation…

Or this breathless eyewitness account…

Or (your correspondent’s favorite), this dispatch on an attack against Israel.

Much, much more at RadioFail.

As we twiddle our dials, we might draft a long and involved, dramatically-arched sentence or two, as today is the anniversary of the publication of Henry James’ first novel, Roderick Hudson (1875).

source

Son apáticos, indolentes [...] Ahí está la razón de por qué comen y duermen tanto [1]

1.

Leo a pares

las novelas de Javier Marías

(Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí & Negra espalda del tiempo)

y las de Henry James

(The Tragic Muse & Roderick Hudson).

El primero, à-la-inglesa, describe el carácter de los españoles.

El segundo, à-la-inglesa, describe el carácter de los americanos.

2.

Si se fijan

en la aseveración de Mussolini que adorna el comienzo de este post, se darán cuenta de que Benito, à-la-española, describe a las claras el carácter de los italianos.

“Y así suceden las cosas siempre que haya intención por que sucedan” [2]

3.

Dice Leonardo Sancho Dobles que

“El poeta y el místico buscan una comunicación/comunión con la alteridad” [3].

Y sucede que convertirse en un remedo del otro (los jirones del autor que trasudan fríamente en la figura narrador) es quizá la forma única en la que podemos describirnos a nosotros mismos.

De esta forma pues es que necesitamos una distancia jactanciosa con el dolor, para poder comunicarnos con él y, hasta cierto punto, hallarle no tanto el raciocinio del místico, pero sí el denuedo lúdico del poeta.

De ahí que la buena narrativa exude liricismo y chirigota, aun cuando el numen del artista provenga de los más ponzoñosos abismos de la abyección y la ignominia.

4.

“los hombres nuevos no le temen a la deconstrucción” [4]

Pero

volvamos de una vez a Marías y James.

De alguna forma, cuando lee uno a grandes autores los deconstruye.

Y lo hace -si es listo- para su provecho.

Hay entonces una clara distinción entre el plagio más o menos encubierto, la solazada imitación del estilo o los temas, y la asimilación de la verdadera poética de un autor, como acicate para la creación de la propia.

O incluso iría más allá y utilizando la terminología de Genette tal vez hablaría de transtextualidad o (re)apropiación.

A mi entender, es lo que sucede en el estadio primerizo de los escritores, tal vez cuando hablan en voz baja con sus maestros, les piden consejo y/o perdón.

Por ejemplo, leer a Marías es ver cómo éste ha ido deconstruyendo novela a novela  y asimilando a Bernhard y a Sterne, pero también Nabokov y, quizá tangencialmente a Faulkner, seguro gracias a Benet.

El estilismo narrativo de Heny James le debe tanto a los mosaicos dickensianos, pero también a Merimée y Balzac, así como, oblicuamente, pensamos en un diálogo de éste con Hawthorne en sus novelas cortas.

Pero, sin embargo, tanto James como Marías, son puramente James y Marías y nada más que eso;

ambos con sus preocupaciones artísticas

(el lenguaje y cómo contar en el segundo y la tentación apasionada que nubla la rigidez filosófic0/religiosa del artista en el segundo),

sus temas y su mundo.

Ambos sofisticados  y cosmopolitas.

Ambos preocupados por las ligerezas de su tiempo y sus estilos y tonos

(Marías con la novela de espías e intrigas y James con su investigación neogótica).

Ambos parte de una tradición y, sin embargo, únicos.

Los dos con un intacto sentido del fracaso, del deber, pero, sin embargo, de la necesidad de seguir jugando.

Como reza la tumba de Henry James: “interpreter(s) of his generation”.

5.

Es una paradoja que no deja de asombrarme.

Y me refiero a la secreta ambición de la vida por reagrupar lo que teníamos desperdigado.

Esa “sensación de que los libros me buscan” [5]

El mismo James que hacía tiempo no leía, o Marias, al cual detesté aviesa y gozosamente por culpa de su fallas en el idiolecto de sus personajes y que, contra todo pronóstico, reapareció saleroso y peleón en los últimos tiempos

[y Ángela tiene gran culpa de ésto].

Pero -y lo digo en mi descargo-

también a James se le achacaba la irrealidad de sus diálogos.

Y qué, además, me pregunto. Qué, qué importa.

Porque es que ficción y realidad aunque vengan aparejadas no son partes constitutivas de lo mismo.

No son hermanas, sino primas.

6.

El gran escritor

es aquel que -a sabiendas- pone su escritura al borde mismo del abismo de su estilo y sale airoso.

Es aquel

que presenta sus cartas sin más demora y va anexionándoles a estas apéndices,

glosas y el martirio de un razonamiento que se va vistiendo de interminables tropos y disquisiciones,

digresiones y hasta algún paso en falso y que,

sin embargo,

consigue que no solo el cuerpo del delito (la obra) salga rejuvenecida de la experiencia, sino doblemente el lector -al ser participe de ambos logros: el suyo propio y el del escritor-.

Tanto al escribir (cuando redoblamos -si se me permite la expresión- las campanas del otro, el maestro), cuanto al leer (desvelando el complot secreto del escritor),  la experiencia es doble y, por ello, rica.

Así, la pareja Lector/Escritor y Escritor/Maestro conforman un vínculo preciso, a la vez doloroso y feliz,  como el que sucede en estos versos de diferentes poemas del poeta contemporáneo de Rilke, George Trackl,

el niño que:

Peacefully  looks into the night

With eyes that are completely truthful [6]

y la musa nocturna a la que se le espeta:

There you feel: it is good! in painful exhaustion [7]

7.

El hombre nuevo,

en fin, es aquel que, de la parte del lector, no teme ser a un tiempo niño y musa y, del otro lado, de la parte del escritor, no teme realizarse como autor inspirado por las Gracias y ser consecuentemente después sólo noche oscura que es observada con la crueldad de la mirada sincera del niño.

O resumiendo mucho más:

el buen lector exige a su autor preferido que este sea uno, pero consecuencia de muchos,

y el buen autor le pide a sus lectores que sean una multitud que escruta siempre por propio egoísta interés.

Ambos (autor y lector, maestro y discípulo) son tesoreros de un secreto milenario que es (re)dicho cada vez que la pareja se (re)encuentra,

y esto sucede siempre en la tranquilidad de una cena con velas y buen vino,

en esas veladas

en las que se presiente siempre el colofón glorioso de la alcoba.

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

Extra,

EXtra;

———————–EXTra…. EXTRa ….. ¡¡¡¡EXTRA!!!!!——————

Tercera acción (o intento de destrucción del lenguaje):

Comprar -a crédito- vidas múltiples (e inacabadas) de un objeto y que se superpongan en el tránsito gozoso de la utilización práctica del mismo.

Fíjense en los precios:

1. Precio de Alcampo

(lugar inexistente): 9.50 euros.

2. Precio de la Fnac

(contubernio gafapasta-generación mutante): 9.95 euros.

Corolario del experimento:

a) Francia nos invade.

b) la (post)modernidad es un presupuesto neo-volteariano.

Addenda (de Ángela):

“Imagine … a neurosurgeon … deliberately stimulating a patient’s brain to induce a thought -he is merely doing clumsily and invasively what a novelist does from a distance. Some outrageous comparisons: Shakespeare was a better psychologist than Freud, Jane Austen has more to say about human nature than Margaret Mead, Dostoevsky than Pavlov, Proust than Piaget. (An exception: the philosopher-psychologist William James was at least the equal of his novelist brother Henry in terms of insight into the human mind.)”
“Ian McEwan and the Rational Mind,” Matt Ridley, Foreword to Ian McEwan, Sebastian Groes (ed.). London: Continuum, 2009, viii.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Canción del día:

We used technology but technology let us down – Maus Haus

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

[1] Benito Mussolini (hablando sobre el carácter indolente de los españoles), recogido por su amante Claretta Petacci, en sus diarios. Artículo de Lucia Magi para El País (17-11-2009).

[2] Miquel Urmeneta, en su blog Natural born Majadero, hablando sobre la gestación de Kukuxumusu.

[3] Leonardo Sancho Dobles (Universidad de Costa Rica). “Misticismo/Erotismo: algunos ejes de la poética de Octavio Paz“, en Revista Espéculo (UCM). Número 35. 2007.

[4] David Puente. “Vuelve el hombre nuevo” (sobre Colin Newman). Revista Lamono. Especial EnMasculino. Noviembre de 2009.

[5] Javier Marias. “Negra espalda del tiempo”. Ed. DeBolsillo. Barcelona. Octubre de 2006. [pág 205]

[6] & [7] George Trakl. “Romance in the night” & “Evening Muse”, de Poems. Ed. Kurt Wolff. Leipzig. 1913.

Hello

Book club no.29 was held at my flat on Saturday. Our text this time was “Washington Square” by well-known effete Anglo-American short story writer and novelist, Henry James.

This was one of the better-received texts we’ve read for book club, with many participants agreeing it deserved a place in the upper pantheon of the Book Club Hall of Fame (still under construction). However, Flemming was particularly vociferous in his distaste for the book, claiming its characters were worthless and unlikable. Specifically, our debate focused on the character of Catherine Sloper – was she a wet drip who remained a wet drip at the end of the book, or was she the story’s only honest character who lived and suffered by her own moral code (as Wakeling proposed)? There was a pronounced male-female split in the discussions, with some of the boys admiring Dr Sloper’s gruff exterior, while Wakeling and Mofo were more sympathetic to Catherine’s predicament.

Overall, though, the text stimulated some interesting debate on matters such as the story’s inherent theatricality, its use of silence, the metaphor of the square, and the varieties of sexuality on display. Pete also helpfully guided the discussion via his useful GCSE-level questions scrawled in the back of his copy of the book.

The baton for book club no.30 – surely deserving of some kind of celebration? – is handed over to Owain.

Pete

Gertrude Wentworth (Lisa Eichhorn) in landscape with gazebo, 1979 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala Europeans

Daisy (Cybill Shepherd) and Winterbourne (Barry Brown) watch a Punch and Judy show, 1974 Bogdanovich Daisy Miller

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking about a specific period of costume drama that is not done sufficient justice to, partly because it’s not recognized as a period or type within the history of costume drama movies. I’ve seen it mentioned as an entity only by Andrew Higson in his English Heritage, English Cinema. Higson suggests (as do other writers about early 20th century costume drama, e.g., Pam Cook, Fashioning the Nation and Gainsborough Films, and Sue Harper, Picturing the Past) that from the 1920s through 50s costume drama was a pop art: little attention was paid to historically accurate detail; it was in fact shunned lest it intimidate audiences. Higson talks as so many do (Claire Monk) of the explosion of costume drama in the 1990s, how these apparently erudite and elite high quality movies made themselves popular by addressing relevant issues today, using stars (especially sexy male controlled macho ones), and how since then there’s been partly a return to popular art so the latest costume dramas (post-2004) are mix historical accuracy, subtlety of psychology, literal faithfulness to a source with broader action-adventure, dance, sexualization, adventure (e.g., the Elizabeth movies with Cate Blanchett).

To sum up, previous to the later 1960s, or 1920-50, you have this pop costume drama/film adaptation where no attempt at historical accuracy is really made and ruthless changes in the original text: Two epitomizing examples of the 1930s through 50s pop types are the 1940 MGM P&P and 1945 Kitty. Afterwards, the 1990s, there’s a turn to opulence, faithfulness which still uses the stories and characters to address contemporary issues and an increase in naturalism/realism, plus computer techniques coming in. An epitomizing example is the 1995 Pride and Prejudice; this type is still being done only with less lavish budgets.

Well, what about this period from the 1960s through 80s? I’d say it’s characterized by boldness about art itself, not afraid to stylize strongly (which I’m especially drawn to), going for long shots (so Ang Lee was doing nothing new in the 1995 S&S by Emma Thompson), language close to or literally lifted from its textual source (really faithful transpositions or very carefully considered commentaries). I’ve written about two of these recently: the 1965 Tony Richardon’s Tom Jones and the 1974 Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Daisy and Mr Giovanelli admiring the art work in a cathedral in Rome

Felix (Tim Woodward) and Gertrude dancing in his studio in a flood of sunlight

Tonight I’d like to single out two I’ve watched lately — as well as read the texts: Henry James’s Daisy Miller adapted by Peter Bogdanovich-Frederick Raphael-Frank Marshall and his The Europeans adapted by Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala. What fascinates me is they are both from subtly nostalgic texts which criticize radically how we deal with sexual experience against a backdrop of a historically understood era’s social and even religious mores. Now one finds this in the other art costume dramas of the era: think Brideshead Revisited (adpated from Evelyn Waugh) and Love for Lydia (adapted from H.E. Bates).

These Henry James novellas don’t compromise with popularity, are about sexuality and central familial-class issues, and also (by chance) about an opposition of values made picturesque by a contrast between an imagined innocent US and corrupt Europe. I could as well have discussed the 1970s through 80s Austen movies, the long mini-series (Pallisers, Poldark), Brideshead Revisited. All have a delicacy and complication of approach (different moods and phases in the mini-series), which I’ve just now observed for the first time in a long time in Sandy Welch’s remarkably humanly complex 2009 BBC Emma (she substitutes simplicity for stylization — so this could really be a party at an inn, neither too small nor too opulent and brimming with people as in the 1990s through recent TV mini-series).

I will cover James’s Daisy Miller and Bogdanovich’s movie more at length; I’ll be brief on James’s Europeans and concise on Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala movie. Basically I go over the second movie to show the same sorts of things we see in the first movie.

**************
First up, Daisy Miller: book and film. Here is a summary of the novella’s outline and basic information about Bogdanovich’s film adaptation

In the novel, our third-person consciousnes and point of view, Winterbourne, a 27 year old expatriate bachelor American who wants young (and to him) wild Daisy Miller to follow conventions for her own sake. Daisy Miller wants to live out and go beyond the options available to women. The odyssey of experience which Daisy, “the child of nature and of freedom” ["Preface," Daisy Miller, 1909], undergoes reveals society’s desire to confine women within a narrow and rigidly defined sphere. While those women who accept their circumscribed existence pay varying prices of neurotic illness, ineffectuality, and hypocrisy, the woman who ignores social prescription is punished by ostracism and death.

Although the women characters uphold the system which restricts them, the chief arbiter of society for Daisy is a man, the aptly-named Winterbourne. As a definer and enforcer of the bourne or boundary of social propriety, whose verdict has the life-denying implications of winter, Winterbourne represents the artificial world which has ultimate control over the lives of women. Daisy is identified with natural world.

Winterbourne is strongly attached to Geneva, a city identified with Calvinism and its social reflection, a decorum which is both narrowly conventional and hypocritically relaxed. The innocent and natural association of young people is strictly controlled and even discouraged: “In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain rarely occurring conditions.” Such a view is sustained in Rome by Mrs. Walker, a lady who “had spent several winters at Geneva” and is thus linked to Winterbourne’s position both seasonally and geographically

With Winterbourne as observer and mediator, Daisy Miller develops as a series of confrontations (sometimes at second hand) between Daisy and those women who live under the sign of Geneva. She is pretty and he is attracted; by end of story he realizes he has lost out. Randolph, obstreperous brother, a parallel for Daisy only it’s girls who are controlled not boys. Mrs Miller, a hopeless hapless helpless sort of woman. Like Mrs. Costello’s headaches,

Mrs. Miller’s dyspepsia is both a response to the paucity of meaningful activity in her life and a substitute for it. She becomes animated only when discussing her illness, an affliction which at least makes her important to one person–her doctor:

Chloris Leachman as Mrs Miller to the side

A poignant significant utterance by Daisy or Annie Miller: “I should not think you would let them be so unkind!” she cries to Winterbourne. She never realizes the consternation she causes in Rome. “I don’t believe it,” she says to Winterbourne. “They are only pretending to be shocked.” Her blindness to the nature of the American colony is equalled by her blindness to Winterbourne and Giovanelli as individuals. While Winterbourne fails to “read” her “riddle” rightly, she fails to “read” his. She feels his disapproval in Rome, but she is not aware of his affection for her. Neither does she reveal any adequate perception of her impact on Giovanelli. To Daisy, going about with Mr. Giovanelli is very good fun. Giovanelli’s feelings, we learn at the end, have been much more seriously involved.

Basically, she is lonely, and she has never know much “society,” except that of gentlemen. There’s a curious mischievous resonance in her words which has the function of alerting us to how much she may be misunderstood here. It’s not a game as she thinks. She offers affection and Winterbourne doesn’t understand; she refuses to abide by conventions and knows she is refusing. She’s a sweet smart Lydia Bennet

As to the other characters: Mr Giovanelli who goes about with Daisy and is content to be her constant friend, is a (to the colony of upper class English and American types) a socially unaceptable Italian — he is also a kind man. There’s Mr Winterbourne’s hypocritical aunt, Mrs Costelloa cold narrow and shallow snob, cold; Mrs Walker, a seething kind of woman, incident in Pincian gardens caught beautifully in the movie. She sees Daisy as breaking some pact all women keep together: by phonily pretending not to be sexualized, they can (she thinks) better manipulate men. Eugenio, the courrier, an escort, he knows what they should or should not be doing.

What the movie and story share: Chapter 1 Winterbourne and Daisy meet in Vevey, Switzerland; Chapter 2 they go to the Castle of Chillon together (where prisoners were thrown to die); Chapter 3, they meet again in Rome where she is being escorted around by Mr Giovanelli; Chapter 4 she is snubbed and made a pariah and has only Mr Giovanelli to be with; she insists on going to the Coliseum where she catches malaria and dies.

This outline may be said to omit everything important and particularly the characters of Mrs Costello, Mr Winterbourne’s censorious elderly aunt, censorious not of bad behavior or sin (he lives with a woman in Geneva), but of allowing anyone in public to suspect you of flouting proprieties, much less doing anything unconventional (he pretends to be taking courses), Mrs Costello’s presence important in Chapter 2 (Daisy not a hypocrite; comes out with truths: “she doesn’t want to know me”; she does in the book have interesting reflections; in the film she is made something of a philistine, a little dense); and of Mrs Walker in Chapter 3 (enraged at Daisy’s snubbing her, failure to recognize Mrs Walker’s right to control).

(From the later 18th century through to the early 20th, among the middling classes, when a couple was engaged, it was understood they were really going to get married and it was okay to indulge in a certain amount of sex. When Daisy tells Winterbourne she is engaged, she is spiteful or enticing or asking for trouble — she is saying she may be having sex with Mr Giovannelli. When she assures him by message she was not engaged, she is saying they didn’t.)

To turn to the movie, where James uses contrasts of place in story; the movie contrasts social occasions — and puts before us contrasts of beautiful and haunted places. Geneva, capital of calvinism where people are suspicious and repressed; Vevey, lovely, summer, freedom; near is Chateau de Chillon, where the imagery of dungeons, columns, death and torture from religious fanaticisms remains are felt everywhere (and yet the feel is a gentle melancholy); Rome, dangerous settled society, with coliseum in background, beautiful melancholy imagery of death and dying In the story, p 62

Now I’ll look at the story as pictorial phases. The first phase is Vevey: Winterbourne meets Randolph, then Daisy;
we see his evening meeting with Aunt in Bath’s; later Mrs Miller and then Eugenio on terrace, then they visit Chillon, and we have one more brief scene with Mrs Costello. The movie uses all these.

The second phase includes the visit to Mrs Costello by Winterbourne; Mrs Walker’s at home, the walk in the Pincian gardens, where Mrs Walker’s carriage is refused; the evening party where Mrs Walker snubs Daisy; Winterbourne and Mrs Costello visit St Peter where they see Daisy and Giovanelli wandering; Winterbourne comes upon pair in palace of Caesars; then sees or hears Daisy and Giovanelli in Colosseum (wasteland) at night; Daisy’s illness and death presented through opera, corridor, Winterbourne’s two visits to hotel, and then funeral

Some differences: the movie opens with Randolph; book opens with Winterbourne; Punch and Judy show added; Winterbourne’s friend, Charles; also Mr Giovanelli’s singing. The movie dramatizes the scene at the grave fully and poignantly.

I suggest this film doesn’t present things differently but rather different things. We lose the subjective narration. Cybill Shepherd excellent as Daisy; so too Barry Brown (Winterbourne) who was a melancholy man; Chloris Leachman as Mrs Miller, James MacMurtry, Randolph, Mildred Natwick Mrs Costello, Eileen Brennan Mrs Walker, Duilio del Prete (Giovanelli) Screenplay Frederick Raphael. Directed and produced by Bogdanovich who was having an affair with Shepherd at the time.

I loved this evocative visit: as Prisoner of Chillon, Bonnivard, the Genevan freedom fighter, confined there solitarily for 6 years. The dialogue throughout in the film refers to the haunted nature of the place. The allusion is not really a parallel (Daisy is not that much a prisons), but it is suggestive. This and colossseum as place where great cruelty once happened is in the film. We see them at play in the dungeon, but its connection to death and the destruction of people by their society is felt; as they ride away they look contemplative.

The visit foreshadows the later visits of Daisy with Mr Giovannelli to the Colosseum. Now these are seen by them — as Mr Winterbourne overhears their laughter — as fun apparently. But we see them at a distance in this place and it could be they are having sex; at any rate, she sickens and dies. And the disjunction between the playful atmosphere of the first and realities of the place and melancholy close anticipates what we are to surmize about the colosseum visits.

Dress counts in the movie and is partly what makes people come: Cybill Shepherd is given just gorgeous outfits (so much flounce and furbelow); as Daisy she is in beautiful innocent light colors (white, pale pink, light blue, she seems to radiate light); Mrs Walkman is in dark green and red seems to draw light into herself; Mrs Costello in very severe clothes. Mrs Miller is very fussy and seen from a distance a shadowy widow figure fleeing attention, very nervous. Eugenio is very sombre and formal as he smokes away; Winterbourne is impeccably correct in dress; and Giovanelli is given many informal florid touches.

As Winterbourne attracted to Daisy, we are to feel she's attracted to him far more than we do in the book. By her sheer physical presence, she's more sexual. Cybil Shepherd was a beautiful woman. She speaks the lines rapidly and ephemerally conveying a sense of a brief heedless kind of life. Chattering, she is imperious, sit over there, do this and do that. Hurry up, Mr Winterbourne. She offers easy affection and he can't understand this.

Few long shots dwelling on the landscape – though what is there is effective. The film tends to give us long shots at end of an episode. to establish where we are, as filler, to end an episode.

Daisy and Mr Giovanelli sing “Pop goes the weasel.”

Bogdanovich relies on close ups to get across strong drama. Comedy is the medium shot. As against non-story music of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart (the opera is Verdi), we have two light American songs: Pop goes the weasel an d”When you and I were young, Maggie. Funny and innocent; nostalgic and sweet. Haunting thematic significance when it’s played over grave of a girl who will now never have been anything but young. Here is Daisy in one of the last shots of her at the Colosseum, showing the grimness of her inner life towards the end.

The movie was a commercial failure. Bogdanovich is not liked it’s said and it was not promoted by the studio. But it was moer than that. First, it failed to address itself clearly enough to contemporary topics; it means to, but it doesn't manage it. You might say it's problem is it's too faithful. In its 19th century era, this story was attacked in its time as shocking — it was understood James getting at these norms. It was seen as attack on American girl — exposing them as frivolous. It's a contrast of old world European and new "innocent" world American Most people don't care in the least about this any more; only those well-versed in 19th century American literature probably know about it.

What could Bogdanovich have done — anticipating the 1990s? he could have shown Winterbourne's life in Geneva. In the film Colosseum signifies cruelty (gladiators died there) just as Castle of Chillon does. You could have shown Geneva to be a hypocritical uptight sinful place.

Second, Barry Brown as Winterbourne is central and not given enough lines or things to do. The movie wants us to see that Winterbourne's complacency has been shattered or at least disrupted and the novella wants us to feel Winterbourne has not been deeply affected. The novel damns Winterbourne much more. But it is true Barry Brown comes across as stiff. He is given many of the point of view shots. We see a lot of the movie from his eyes, just about all of it. There are objective shots, but not many.

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I began to watch The Europeans for the sake of Robin Ellis. I had been watching him as Edward Ferrars in the 1971 S&S, and then read his effective lucidly written account, Making Poldark. His career and fortune were made by that mini-series. I had noticed he played the demur supposedly repressed young hero in other films; in Bel Ami, he played a character whose sexuality was ambiguous. In The Europeans he is Robert Acton who decides not to marry the demi-monde Countess Munster, once Eugenia Young (Lee Remnick).

Note the strained faces looking forward

We have comic renditions of the same discomfort:

For Henry James’s story, here is a thorough account.

What holds your attention in the movie and at the same time makes you yawn is the persistent holding to minutiae of detail. We have exquisitely photographed landscapes (as the one above) and carefully held shots of people repressed.

Felix watching fish

This has become a convention: the shot of the character at the window with bars

There are shots with the characters poised in parallel postures:

Gertrude and Charlotte

In both Daisy Miller and The Europeans close attention has been paid to dress, corsets, how people walked, the line of the silhouette that runs from the top of the actor’s head to the tips of his or her toes.

Again the music is carefully chosen: apt is Clara Schumann’s Trio, Opus 17 — very slow, played by Eugenia when she is at home waiting for Robert Action to call. Against these we once again have the American ballads done straight, comically and nostalgically: “Shall we gather at the river” is in the background too.

The themes here include the self-deception of self-conscious virtue. Felix and Eugenia, ex-Americans who have become a Bohemian artist and woman separated from her German aristocratic husband. They come to the US seeking shelter. The relatives are Brahmin unitarians; only Gertrude shows herself restless at having to go to church to listen to Mr Brand. Mr Brand is paired off with Charlotte, the pious sister, Felix and Gertrude make an escape into one another’s arms. But the Countess seems to overplay her hand and loses Robert — much to their ambiguous relief and regret.

This was not a big box office success, but it pulled in respectable-sized audiences and has not been forgotten — partly because it’s Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala productions and since Merchant’s death, Ivory and Robert Emmet Long have been producing books about their films, and on the DVDs, there are features which promote the films as important, explaining them and providing intriguing accounts of how they were made.

To return to the movie itself, much that is pleasurable in it would be precluded today. The very nature of the looser medium precludes the intense introspective kind of art in Europeans (as well as Daisy Miller). They have either complicated psychological scenes (as in the typical BBC mini-series of the era) or these mysterious carefully poised stills.

What would have been done in the later 1980s through 90s? The ambiguous sexuality of Robert Acton would have been brought out. He’s one of James’s many closet homosexual males. The Countess’s demi-monde world would have been shown somehow. The film-makers would have made some attempt to address the question of money, class, religion more directly and for our own era. More stars would have been hired, and in the 1990s just about all of them be conventionally beautiful types. Lavish budget, naturally.

In 2000 we’d see a retreat to minimalism, much less historical accuracy and change of costume to be more like the 21st century. Much less money, and more addressing of contemporary issues and more daring interpretations of the original book. We see this in the latest Austen Persuasion, 2007: our protagonists are abject, possessed by grief and despair, revenants.

But not until the later 1960s or after the later 1980s, do we get for its own sake just this kind of pictorial extravaganza in the sun (Daisy Miller) just for itself:

Cyril Shepherd as Daisy looking up to where Mr Giovanelli is pointing

As well as this kind of extravaganza of fall leaves, golden, yellow with Lee Remnick as the isolated demi-monde who keeps herself out of the spotlight, to the side:

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This was an extraordinary moment in art costume drama, and it’s been brought back in Sandy Welch’s 2009 BBC/WBGH Emma where I hope by next week over on my Reveries under the Sign of Jane Austen to show simplicity has been made to substitute for too overt or heavy stylization, but a lot of the other techniques of this era have once more been brought into effective play.

Garai as an assertive Emma, her upper arm sexy like that — in a quiet way.

The camera swings round to show his intense grave face

Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller as Emma and Mr Knightly. For most of the dance at the Crown Inn, it’s matter of the rousing non-sexualized square-dance boisterous movement and gaiety; but for a few moments there is a dance in the traditional row style with the arms of the male and female intertwined, very dream like and erotic and yet grave. But today still contemporary issues are being addressed at the same time as more traditional interpretations of the original book brought back.

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After I wrote the above, I watch the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Maurice which is among the first of the opulent, relevant later 1980s to 2000 or so type; I had seen the 1991 BBC Clarissa as a landmark of this type (said to be so in several books too), but this Maurice does what the Clarissa film does. I was so moved; I love this later era too. I had thought we were in a different one now: minimal, retreat from contemporary issues, abject women (films from 2001-8), but this new Emma and Heidi Thomas’s BBC commentary adaptation of Gaskell’s Cranford of last year signal a new phase once again. I wonder if this new phase has anything to do with the reality that so many more women are writing mini-series; both these are by women writers and have women producers. Hmmm.

Ellen

Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke in late 1846 or early 1847

Our lives are Swiss –
So still – so Cool –
Till some odd afternoon,
The Alps neglect their Curtains,
And we look farther on!

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between –
The solemn Alps –
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!

N.B.: R.W. Franklin reports that this poem by Emily Dickinson exists in two fair copies, the one reproduced below, and the other as sent with a letter to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger points out further that Susan and her husband Austin Dickinson lived in an Italianate villa (called “The Evergreens”) set off behind the Dickinson Homestead. The only variants are these: the exclamation marks appear in the Fascicle, but not in the manuscript sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson; and in the Fascicle, Dickinson breaks the poem into two stanzas, and substitutes “farther” for “further” in line five.

Dickinson's manuscript, as bound in Fascicle 6 (ca. late 1859)

Habegger considers first, and briefly, the epistolary context: Dickinson wittily re-describes the (actually quite short) distance between her own homestead, which is in the vernacular New England style (though grand in its way), as an Alpine curtain that separates (and “guards”) Switzerland from Italy. But Habegger as quickly points out what is immediately clear to any reader of Dickinson: the poem is not an occasional poem, and is by no means limited in reach by these immediate epistolary and architectural contexts, though, as I will later intimate, these immediate contexts are, in fact, illuminated by the poem—and provocatively so.

But first for the poem taken straight up, as plucked from the Fascicle, not from the envelope that conveyed it to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. How does Italy stand in relation to Switzerland here—or rather to lives led in a “cool” & “still” “Swiss” way, as Dickinson imagines it? Geneva of course was the seat of Calvinism, and Italy the seat of, well, Rome and Roman Catholicism.

"The Siren," by John William Waterhouse (circa 1900)

The Alps that are said to “intervene” and “guard” the border between these two modes of life bear two aspects: “Solemnity” and, if I may put it this way, “Sirenicity.” The solemnity is the face, I suppose they present (in the poem) to Italy: Geneva & Northern Europe lay beyond, with their Calvinism, etc., and all that Calvinism signifies: the “still,” the “cool,” the “stern,” the Fatalism of it all—even unto innate depravity. But seen as separating “Italy” from Northern Protestant Europe & their New England counterparts these Alps take on a second aspect: “The siren Alps.” The Sirens of course are the ones of Greek legend: seductive and dangerous women, sometimes taking the form of mermaids, at others the form of winged women, or as birds with the heads of beautiful women. It is hardly impossible to rule out Dickinson’s having implied, in her letter/poem, that Susan Gilbert was such a woman—a Siren, in short. And the biographical sources, at times, bear this out, particularly in the later years. Dickinson had her intuitions, &, like Emerson, know them to be better than her tuition.

But the salient point of course is simply that the Sirens are seductive, and dangerously so, too. Anyone who ever read Henry James’s 1878 novella Daisy Miller knows what “Italy,” and more particularly “Rome” signified to the proper Northern European/New England type in mid-19th century America: a place as seductive as it was dangerous (or corrupt)—especially for young women called Daisy, to which flower Dickinson, as if queerly anticipating the theme of the novella, so often likened (or allegorized) herself. The novella, like the poem, by the way, also turns on a contrast between Switzerland and Italy—which is simply to say that this was obviously something of a conventional topic in American writing at the time, and a topic under which we may range Dickinson’s poem. When she turns her gaze toward Italy, beyond those Siren Alps, she sees, there, something enticing, seductive—something, I suppose, the very opposite of the “cool” and the “still,” which would be (what?) the “hot” and the “agitated.” I am suggesting, needless to say, that this poem (like Daisy Miller) has to do, in some sense, with sexuality. (Incidentally, I would include “Our lives are Swiss” amongst a cluster of Dickinson’s poems I like to call “heliotropic.” These include such poems as “The Daisy follows soft the Sun…”; “As if some little Arctic flower / Upon the polar hem – / Went wandering down the Latitudes / Until it puzzled came / To continents of summer – / To firmaments of sun….”; “No Autumn’s intercepting Chill / Appalls this Tropic Breast / But African exuberance….”, among a number of others.)

A few words more. The controversies concerning the nature of Dickinson’s relationship to Susan Gilbert may be relevant here, given the assumptions at times made that the relation was, in part, erotic (at least in thought and feeling), and given that “Our lives are Swiss” was sent to Sue. I rather think that the epistolary context sheds little light on the poem, and that Habegger is correct not to engage in the matter too deeply.

Know-Nothing Banner, ca. mid-1850s

But controversies must be borne in mind. Perhaps of some interest as well is the role that “Italy” and “Roman Catholicism” played in American culture, especially in New England. The 1850s saw the rise and fall of the Know-Nothing Party, which was forthrightly anti-Catholic and “nativist” in character, though their ire was directed not at Italy chiefly, but at the Irish immigrants who were pouring into American harbors at the time, refugees from famine and British persecution. And there was a marked strain of anti-Catholicism in the abolitionist movement, which regarded the institution of the Catholic Church, especially as it existed in Italy, as vestigially “feudal.” One need only read Frederick Douglass’s account of his visit to Rome (in his 1892 Life and Times) to see what I mean:

For one, however, I was much more interested in the Rome of the past than in the Rome of the present; in the banks of its Tiber with their history than in the images, angles and pictures on the walls of its splendid churches; in the preaching of Paul eighteen hundred years ago than in the preaching of the priests and popes of to-day. The fine silks and costly jewels and vestments of the priests of the present could hardly have been dreamed of by the first great preacher of Christianity at Rome, who lived in his own hired house, and whose hands ministered to his own necessities. It was something to feel ourselves standing where this brave man stood, looking on the place where he lived, and walking on the same Appian Way where he walked, when, having appealed to Cæsar, he was bravely on the way to this same Rome to meet his fate, whether that should be life or death. This was more to me than being shown, as we were, under the dome of St. Peter’s, the head of St. Luke in a casket, a piece of the true cross, a lock of the Virgin Mary’s hair, and the leg-bone of Lazarus; or any of the wonderful things in that line palmed off on a credulous and superstitious people.

Frederick Douglass, ca. 1879, photo by George K. Warren.

In one of these churches we were shown a great doll, covered with silks and jewels and all manner of strange devices, and this wooden baby was solemnly credited with miraculous power in healing the sick and averting many of the evils to which flesh is heir. In the same church we were, with equal solemnity, shown a print of the devil’s cloven foot in the hard stone. I could but ask myself what the devil could a devil be doing in such a holy place. I had some curiosity in seeing devout people going up to the black statue of St. Peter—I was glad to find him black; I have no prejudice against his color—and kissing the old fellow’s big toe, one side of which has been nearly worn away by these devout and tender salutes of which it has been the cold subject. In seeing these, one may well ask himself, What will not men believe? Crowds of men and women going up a stairway on their knees; monks making ornaments of dead men’s bones; others refusing to wash themselves—and all in order to secure the favor of God,—give a degrading idea of man’s relation to the Infinite Author of the universe. But there is no reasoning with faith. It is doubtless a great comfort to these people, after all, to have kissed the great toe of the black image of the Apostle Peter, and to have bruised their knees in substituting them for feet in ascending a stairway, called the Scala Santa. I felt, in looking upon these religious shows in Rome, as the late Benjamin Wade said he felt at a negro camp-meeting, where there were much howling, shouting, and jumping: ‘This is nothing to me, but it surely must be something to them.’

The hallmark in this paragraph is clear: a kind of anti-sensualism, compounded by a suspicion that Rome & its religion were in some sense lush—seductive, but at the same time distressing (as in fact many “seductive” things are: there must be an enticing air of the forbidden about them). All this is simply to say: Dickinson’s poem is implicated in any of a number of possible contexts: that of her (possibly erotic attraction) to her infamously hot-tempered sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, whom she may be provoking; the discourse involving Americans in their often wary talk about “Italy” and “Roman Catholicism” in the 1850s; and such tendencies within American culture that made possible, and so immediately intelligible,  novellas like Daisy Miller. There may be a whiff of mischievous anti-Catholicism, or “anti-Romanism,” in this poem, though only a whiff (Vivian Pollack takes up the topic in her Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson).

On which note I shall begin to wind things up with another of Dickinson’s poems. It is one of her many flower/bee poems that very obviously deal with sexuality:

The Flower must not blame the Bee -
That seeketh his felicity
Too often at her door -

But teach the Footman from Vevay -
Mistress is “not at home” – to say -
To people – any more!

This is one among many Dickinsonian poems of “renunciation”—renunciation of courtship, of convention, of publication, of some role or other she (irritably) felt herself cast to play. “Vevay” is, of course, a Dickinsonian spelling of “Vevey,” which sits on the shore of Lake Geneva, which—again, with uncanny anticipation—is the very resort town where Daisy Miller first meets the aptly named Winterbourne: so equivocally “Swiss” (though American), so “cool,” so “still,” and yet so distressingly hot for his young Daisy—this dislocated American suitor whose sense of decorum is so upset by his “Daisy” (who follows soft the sun), and who later unsuccessfully makes it his business to “protect” her from the “perils” of Rome and Roman men: to him she is as inscrutable as Dickinson is to many of her readers now, who find themselves, to this day, unable to disentangle the flirtatious from the serious in her writing, and unable to accept that any such disentangling enterprise is utterly misguided—unable to accept that Dickinson is, at times, and in certain moods and modes, quite simply a very queer poet indeed, and all the more engaging for the fact. Who, at the end of the day, can really resist the smarter sort of flirt—other than hired “footmen from Vevey”? Certainly not James’s Winterbourne, whose cogitations James renders as follows:

Cover, Oxford Classics edition.

Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed. He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment. And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva? He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State? Were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt—a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category. He had known, here in Europe, two or three women—persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability’s sake, with husbands—who were great coquettes—dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt. Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one’s intercourse with a pretty American flirt. It presently became apparent that he was on the way to learn.

James had no access to Dickinson’s poetry when he wrote this paragraph; he, as would everyone else, would have to wait until 1890 for that. But he may as well be describing the difficulty, the inability to resist application of categories where none are needed, that afflict and frustrate, let’s say, the lesser readers of Dickinson and other such Daisies. The greater sort of readers of Dickinson have no problem with her “inconduite,” whether lexical, grammatical, syntactical, thematic, or erotic.

N.B.: For a link to the Librivox recording of poems by Dickinson (in their pre-1955 texts), as read aloud by Becky Miller, click here. For the Librivox recording of James’s Daisy Miller, click here. For a link to the Dickinson Electronic Archives—editor in chief, distinguished Dickinson scholar Martha Nell Smith—click here.