Natalia Ginzburg: one of the great writers of the 20th century — an Italian woman

Natalia Ginzburg in her older years (1917-1991)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve written twice now about Natalia Ginzburg in my blogs, once as one of several women writers I’ve been reading in the last few months; and once as one of four Jewish Italian writers whose lives were shaped by the fascist regime and horizon of fascism they had to live with across nearly 3 decades, one of which was a time of a peculiarly brutal war. It included an attempt to exterminate millions of people on the basis of an ethnicity, Jewishness, on the basis of socialist, anti-fascist and communist beliefs, and on the basis of a perceived non-traditional or non-heterosexual sexuality. All of them knew the terror of fleeing militia come to their houses, to take them away to arrest, imprison, perhaps torture and kill them (which did happen to Natalia’s husband, Leone, one at least came close to death (see On Surviving Fascism: Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassanio).

I want to reprise Natalia at full length (for a blog) because since then I’ve read four more of her books, more of her essays, more about her, and I think she belongs here on my blog dedicated to women artists (rather then my more general blog). I feel I know her better. I’ve reread her Family Lexicon or sayings at least three times more. Equally to the point, I’ve read her far more open, revealing, thoughtfully original and riveting books of autobiographical meditations: The Little Virtues and A Place to Live In. Delightful satiric sketches of England alternate with meditations on places of exile. Winter in Abruzzo is a good introduction to Christ Stopped at Eboli. How she went walking and neighbors thought her crazy to do it in winter. At one point in the book she says she did not realize the couple of years she spent there with Leon and two children and had a third were in some ways the happiest of her existence. They began Proust. They were thrown upon one another. Their apartment hunting in Rome. How her world comes alive from within.

Family Sayings is the book by her known best, and includes a wide swathe of 20th century history in Italy as a backdrop to this family chronicle. It has all the characteristics of l’ecriture-femme: cyclical, a deeply private or personal (if inarticulated) viewpoint, a mother-daughter paradigm at its center; a portrait of herself as a mother, marriage to a beloved man as pivotal. de-centered: she hardly ever gives us her or her family’s thoughts hidden from the collective outward life; the anecdotes are mostly about others, with her as the quietly presiding POV. Yet the book is about her life, starting with the time she has consecutive memories at age 5 to near the end of her life when she visited England with her second husband, and now somehow freed of her immediate Italian world can spill out what happened the intimate events and calamities inflicted on her family and close friends and associates as well as their relationships, achievements, losses

Part of the reason for her reticence is this is a memoir, all the people are real, and the events really happened, so she must protect them and herself. I suggest frustration at this led Peg Boyers to write the feelings and thoughts we do surmise (we are given enough to extrapolate) in a series of fictionalized autobiographical poems (written as if written by Natalia), Hard Bread, that give Natalia’s repressed reactions and only partly expressed critiques (even in the autobiographical essays) and celebrations full play. The most extended section is about Cesare Pavese who worked closely with her husband, who she worked with at Einaudi, and who appears to have frequently had suicidal thoughts – who wouldn’t during WW2 – and hated surprises. I take it he didn’t care for liminality – crossing from one mode of existence into another, enduring uncertainty. He visited the US, translated famous American classics into Italian (like Moby Dick famous book is very Thomas Hardy like: The Moon and the Bonfires.

Family sayings are repeated phrases, words, sentences that the family uses as collective comic glue for themselves. And we can track them (as they add and subtract people) from one place to another as they move around Italy, or are forced to move, hide, become imprisoned, escape (her brother swam across a part of the Mediterranean in winter to reach unoccupied France). I loved her plain matter-of-fact style: simple sentences expect us to provide in-depth understanding as when she says of Jewish and other displaced now vulnerable peoples they are “without a country.” While the surface is prosaic, quietly telling about all sorts of interesting people (many involved in politics and literature), the underlying pattern is tragic. Boyers calls her style and tone “astringent yet passionate.” The refrain: I never saw him again (of her husband); they never saw one another again. Like Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room, she produces a portrait of humanity as seen through the lens of an Italian secular and political and only partly Jewish culture (her family had been thoroughly assimilated until suddenly ostracized, under attack, mortally threatened) — during a time of aggressive fascism.

This poem is imagined as by Natalia when she brings out of prison the small box of things found in her husband’s cell after his terrible death:

Prison Box: Inventory (Rome, February 1944)

copy War and Peace
cyrillic type
(fading, spine bent)

cashmere scarf,
arm length
(dirty, white, torn)

photographs of a girl,
two boys
and a woman (frayed at the edges)

pencil stubs
(carbon
tips spent)

lined spiral notebook
(nine pages left,
yellowed, blank)

pair of wire-rimmed glasses
(left lens shattered,
nose support gone)

— from Peg Boyers’ Hard Bread, a poetic autobiography for Natalia, this poem the imagined box of things she could have gotten after her husband, Leone, had been tortured to death

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In the New Statesman, the book was called a portrait of her family

A more concrete way of describing Family Lexicon:

The book follows the contours of Natalia’s life. She omits dates and it’s fair to say some crucial events in her personal life seem to be brushed over – like how did she and Leone fall in love, what was their wedding like, the couple of years together in exile; how did she come to marry a second man, live with him in England – yet I put to you she is central – her tone, she is the narrator shaping our feelings and thoughts about the characters she presents and although not a novel there is a high point and crises and denouement for her and her brothers and mother and father.

A real structure emerges aligned with her family’s life. It is the story of her family. A few dates: she’s the fifth child of a Jewish a renowned Professor and Catholic mother living in Turin. She was born 1916, died 1991. So across the 20th century. Her parents secular, her brothers atheists, very active as anti-fascists – of the artisan intellectual class – think of Thomas Paine not that far off. Married Leone Ginzburg 1938 and there were 3 children. One of them Carlo became a much respected historian. Leon died in prison after enduring horrific torture (it’s said including a mock crucifixion). He had been a communist but so were many so I don’t know why he was so singled out. It reminds me of the German philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer who also died terribly after participating in a semi-famous attempt to kill Hitler. When they returned from exile they went to Rome and proceeded to publish an anti-fascist newspaper – had it been me I’d have fled. She remarries in 1950, Gabriele Baldini a scholar of English literature, spent time with him in England (very funny sketches), he died in 1969.

Her writing career began early in the sense she began to write early but first publication was 1933 I Bambini. She spent a long time as an editor at the respected publisher Einaudi; she was probably one of the people who rejected Lampedusa’s Leopard and who made the publication of holocaust memoirs slow. Curious they were very keen on Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, the American assumed it was simply an anti-communist book. She wrote. 11 what’s called novels, 5 books of essays, much of it partly life writing, much profound despite easy style and wry manner, a number of plays.

Further Contexts:

One is the connection to the holocaust memoirs: her book shows a drive to remember, to record what was and to tell of what the experience of fascism was within the family. A desire to bear witness. She is very concerned not to exaggerate or say something that is not. That’s partly why it seems so jagged. She has not smoothed things out. She tells what she remembers almost as she is remembering it and some of it is way out of chronology.

Two the questions I sent I list pages where you can find the adventures and final fates of her three brothers and Adriano Olivetti who married her sister Paola. No. 4. Another question I simply listed all the places in the text that Leone Ginzburg occurs in – if you want to see how she feels about him you have to go from point to point.

I think after her father and her mother the most coherent portrait of a character in the book is Cesare Pavese, a novelist and essayist and translator (of American texts) of the era – as she was. Like Carlo Levi, Pavese worked with Ginzburg’s husband as an anti-fascist political activist (though he did join the fascist party to get a job as a teacher), he also worked with Natalia at Einaudi, the publisher. She was very close to him and for three pages tries to explain how he came to kill himself.

The second context is nostalgia, a deep desire to retreat, a turning away from what is imminently in front of you. Last week someone mentioned Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis; Family Lexicon is sometimes written about as a very similar kind of book. Her theme is the insufficiency of language to express what is happening about them. So too Bassani – rich Jewish and a fascist for a while – as was Pirandello.

It’s a post-modern book. A post-modern book is one which rejects traditional ideas about hierarchy, what is virtue, and wants to find much more accurate descriptions of what motivates people. They disavow belief in progress. A kind of collapse. I mentioned the first day that Carlo Levi’s book is a poetic masterpiece. If you’ve started you will have seen why I saw that. It is also a political masterpiece. He does something you won’t find in any of our other texts: he goes behind the definitions of fascism or ways of categorizing it to depict specific characters/people he meets who are fuelled by an embittered rage or hatred and explains why and how they got there and how that links to what might seem ridiculous opinions: like at the time being for invading Abysinnia and Ethiopa.

Time after time in the book you feel you have seen the inward working of what is expressed as political ideology. She doesn’t believe in political ideology She’s often quoted (people who are anti-feminist or not feminist love this) as denying she is a feminist though her later books especially focus on women’s worlds and how they are abused, not given equal rights in most areas of life. She isn’t. A political ideology is a mask, a tool. All our writers are strongly sceptical observers. In 1960 when Dr Zhivago won the Nobel prize it has been translated only into Italian where it was an enormous hit. Its sense of a govt that is deeply decadent and and a people out of whack with what were thought historical forces by learned people is the same

There are people who can’t or won’t flee; driven to it, after hiding, a long time elsewhere, return to stay. She was one of these.

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

A few critics:

Rachel Cusk wrote a short essay or column on her which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (April 2018, p 25): Violent Vocation: Natalia Ginzburg, and a “New Template for the Female Voice.” It served as an introduction to Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues. usk suggests that after all Ginzburg was a feminist writer – she denied she was in the category. Not unusual I’m sorry to say. What I told you of was that when she started out she was concerned lest she be dismissed as a woman writer and tried to write like a man. That seems to have meant to her to be impersonal, to hide herself; that Family Lexicon is the turning point and after she writes so very appealingly of herself candidly within limits. Epistolary novels flow from her, more memoirs in the form of life-writing essays on themes. Cusk tells us she was instrumental in forming a woman’s voice for the era; for producing books for the first time which were feminocentric: woman at the center and their lives. Still not easy to do and we still find women using pseudonyms to protect their private lives. The template includes highly violent feelings after silent or not-so-silent violence is inflicted on you; irony, nastiness, indifference to money, courage, contempt for danger, not a desire for success but to be who you are and do what enables you to know your worlds. Yes all that. Not open about sex itself.

Her followers include then Elsa Morante, Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Sibylla Aleramo, Alba de Cespedes, Elena Ferrante.

Mary Gordon’s life and works of Ginzburg in the New York Times Magazine. She’s a well-known American novelist, often writes stories where her characters are influenced by Catholicism. She tells us she first came across Natalia Ginzburg when she was traveling in 1971 as a young college student and in Florence came across a copy of The Little Virtues, was entranced, the only women writer of a book in the whole Italian book store. This essay is about her coming to visit and interview Ginzburg many years later, and they go out to supper together. Mary Gordon basic idea is Ginzburg is an iconoclast; she takes up positions that are not expected or popular. At the time Ginzburg had written a piece siding with adoptive parents in a controversial trial. Very unusual. Gordon retells the family’s endurance and ordeals and flights in WW2, the terrible fate of Leon Ginzburg; how few women were published writers when Ginzburg began her writing career; she smoked heavily – the ambiance of her apartment, Ginzburg’s love of Chekhov. Why did she write a family chronicle? She had just written one of Manzoni’s family instead of a biography of the famous author of the Bethrothed.

Small virtues are the ones that matter. You should not be trying to pass on the great bourgeois norms of prudence, money-making, ambition, thrift, self first, caution, but rather idealism, generosity, greatness of vision, self-sacrifice and whatever is best in the child’s character. I agree with her – no need to repeat what they’ll hear on TV commercials and maybe in mainstream schools. Her writing was not a career to make money and gain fame, but her vocation.

Joan Acocella in the New Yorker finds parallels between attitudes of mind in Ginzburg and Virginia Woolf – Ginzburg a slightly younger generation but also with an academic father, well educated and upper class but at home mother. She quotes from Ginzburg’s My Vocation:

A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. We are deeply, painfully rooted in every being and thing in the world, the world which has become filled with echoes and trembling and shadows, to which we are bound by a devout and passionate pity. Then we risk foundering on a dark lake of stagnant, dead water, and dragging our mind’s creations down with us, so that they are left to perish among dead rats and rotting flowers in a dark, warm whirlpool.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Eric Gudas offers more traditional literary criticism. He found it funny at moments but it is a meditation on memory and story telling. Our author is dredging up memories as they come to her and writing them down.

Turati and Kuliscioff [not married to one another and so an embarrasment to the mother] were ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences. I knew they were both still alive and living in Milan (perhaps together, perhaps in two different apartments) and that they were still involved in politics and the fight against fascism. Nevertheless, in my imagination, they had become tangled up with other figures who were also ever-present in my mother’s reminiscences: her parents, Silvio, the Lunatic, Barbison. People who were either dead or, if still alive, very old and belonging to a distant time, to far-off events when my mother was a child … even if I were to meet them and touch them they were not the same as the ones I imagined and even if they were still alive they were in any case tainted by their proximity to the dead with whom they dwelled in my soul; and they had taken up the step of the dead, light and elusive

My own last thought for noiw: that Family Lexicon represents a turning point in her life – that before this time in England, she was anxious, frightened, nervous about publishing as a woman, as a distinctively woman’s voice. And that she identified women’s voices with subjectivity and private life; but that writing this book freed her.

We might look about all these family sayings – however painful and ambiguous all these jokes are – as a form of cleansing. For her father I think his rants – are a way of exorcizing anger, anxiety, a sense of helplessness. I shall return and read much more by and about her.

Ellen

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Politics & Prose classes on women’s fiction & authors; genre fiction for, by, about women; Lot’s wife re-seen

Hilary Mantel’s superb non-fiction essays, a selection from the London Review of Books

A rare almost Radcliffean female gothic fiction for Oates

Dear friends and readers,

For about 12 weeks now I’ve been taking on-line courses at Politics and Prose and the quality and level of the discussions, the information and insights offered have been as excellent as those I’ve been taking now online from Cambridge, early evening British time, early afternoon East Coast on Saturdays and/or Sundays.  These have occurred across the pandemic and I chose mostly women and mostly Bloomsbury era women (exceptions include a session on E.M. Forster, and a session each on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Christina Rossetti’s poetry).

At Politics and Prose I can’t recommend highly enough Helen Hooper, Elaine Showalter, and at Cambridge University in their programs just about every Literature professor I’ve been privileged to listen to and watch (as these are video zooms). I’ve read books I’ve never read before by Mantel, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates — including Black Water, the astonishing tour-de-force retelling of the drowning and suffocation of Mary Jo Kopecknek at the close of her mad drive with Ted Kennedy down unpaved roads over an unsteady bridge. I’ve now a rounded point of view on Mantel, a way of putting her works together coherently for the first time. Maybe my favorite session from Cambridge in the last few months was on Vita Sackville-West by Alison Hennegan. I discovered Sackville-West’s love of animals.

The question I asked myself about Mantel was how much of her fiction was an escape for and protest against her from her fraught family life, traumatic health problems, and religious ways of thought (especially her interest in seance mediums). Paradoxically it’s not her imaginative fiction-writing self that is most aggressive in building a new identity, but her non-fictional arguments and the first two of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  For Shirley Jackson she takes on the type of the older woman alone, unable to navigate herself in a deeply hostile world (“The Bus”); she cannot escape cruelty it seems. To me Joyce Carol Oates in much of her fiction is herself living vicariously thrills and adventures at whatever price these cost her heroines (death, fearsome rape), with no concern for safety – so often so central to women’s stories. There is something troublingly irresponsible in Oates. It seems to me that American female gothic as practiced by these two women almost avoided the supernatural in order to make concrete to women readers what the life of an American woman is today. By contrast, Mantel is drawn to it in her contemporary British gothic comedic novels.

At the same time I’ve been going further in my popular genre books by, for, about female characters and discovered I can enjoy P.D. James’s Cordelia Grey books (detective fiction), Italian women women’s fiction: I just began Alba de Crespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, as translated by Ann Goldstein:

This last, perhaps not as well known in English-readers’ circles as I hope it might become is about a woman who after WW2 decides to keep a prohibited notebook. The closer word in Italian is prohibited. (Another instance of Goldstein’s inadequacy). The whole set of attitudes Valeria has to get beyond to even purchase and then hide her notebook brings home the inner world of Lila when she keeps a series of notebook and the profound betrayal Elena enacts when she throws them in the river in Florence. Purchase laws are against her, she has no space for it, little time because she hasn’t a maid and she has a job (this money is why she can buy it); she’s afraid to tell her husband who might suggest she give it to her son. I can see that the tragedy might be that she discovers herself … Very modern tale. Jhumpa Lahiri provides an insightful contextual introduction, and Elena Ferrante is quoted urging us to read it

For a couple of weeks I immersed myself in the fiction of Natalia Ginzburg, and the poetry and life of Elsa Morante in the course I’m teaching on Italian memoirs and novels and poetry of the 20th century — more than a couple of weeks because this was a culmination of several months on and off.

With my friend and mate over on Trollope&Peers, Tyler Tichelaar, a historical novelist, I read the whole of Devoney Looser’s very long study of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two early historical fiction (and other genre) writers around the time of, or just before Jane Austen and the Brontes: Sister Novelists: Trailblazing Sisters. The Porter sisters left a huge treasure trove of candid letters from which Looser constructed their hard and fascinating lives as independent women writers. Their courage, stamina, ability to network and live on very little, their romances and enormous amount of fiction produced puts before us a new angle on the world Austen lived in, a lot freer sexually than is usually supposed: the question was did they invent historical fiction or did what they call historical fiction lack a deep consciousness of the past (and real research into it) as shaping force of what was and is, such as we find in Scott.

As I found myself thinking about the archetypal heroine’s journey, so I’ve been looking to see if when women take over popular genres, there is some subset or continuous underlying themes, tropes, norms that cross these genres (each having to conform to readers’ expectations). An image one sees on many of the covers of their detective fiction is the typewriter:

I’ve not come to any conclusion that will allow me to concretize the l’ecriture-femme elements in these books but the topic is on my mind and I’m not alone as I pursue it.

I’m neglecting no one; I’m now watching serial dramas based on Agatha Christie’s famous series of Miss Marple: two nights in a row found me really engaged by one of the original episodes with Joan Hickman (The Body in the Library) and tonight I began a brand-new one: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which includes Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent in a hilarious scene as our amateur female sleuth’s parents.

At night I’ve re-begun Christie’s Autobiography, read by me 40 years ago and still remembered.

So this is some of what has been occupying me over these past weeks — some eighteenth century matter in Looser’s book while I listened to David Rintoul’s exhilarating reading aloud of Scott’s Waverley (very entertaining tones and Scots accent). I will end on a poem by Anna Akhmatova as translated by Annie Finch. The poem was brought to mind by Graham Christian’s writing of postings about poets daily for this month of April on face-book

Lot’s Wife

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” –—Genesis 19:25-26

The righteous man followed where God’s angel guide
shone on through black mountains, imposing and bright —
but pain tore his wife’s breast. It turned her aside
and said, “Look again! There is time for one sight
Of towers, and Sodom’s red halls, and the place
Where you sang in the courtyard or wove on your loom
By windows now empty — where you knew the embrace
Of love with your husband—where birth filled the room —.”

She looked. And the sight was more bitter than pain.
It shut up her eyes so she saw nothing more;
She shimmered to salt; her feet moved in vain,
Deep rooted at last in the place she died for.

Who weeps for her now? Who can care for the fate
Of someone like that—a mere unhappy wife?
My heart will remember. I carry the weight
Of one who looked back, though it cost her her life.

I like this one because the POV is not the implicitly masculine POV or Lot’s male POV. We begin with an impersonal verse; at “it turned her aside” we move into the woman’s perspective (whose name we are still not told. Then we move into the second person, “You” and the last three lines are the torture she’s feeling — just for wanting a sliver of freedom within enslavement unto death.

Just arrived! and this was a hard one to find for a reasonable price ($9.99 at WorldofBooks): The other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Mary at last)

And Isobel completed this beautiful puzzle: that’s Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Nora Zeale Hurston and Virginia Woolf

Ellen

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By way of Richard III: A post-modern praise of Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time & the film The Lost King

Truth is the daughter of time, not authority — Francis Bacon

A very enjoyable film I saw this afternoon! The Lost King, an account of Philippa Langley’s successful push to get many authorities to dig up Richard III’s remains in a parking lot near Leicester Cathedral. Also an unusual, actually strange mystery book also about Richard III (did not kill nephews is the foregone conclusion) which consists of a detective scrutinizing types of history writing in bed. I describe the real merits of the book and defend the film against its now legion of detractors (lamenting what a shame such a good film should be so marred …) all the while discussing R3 too.

Dear Friends and readers,

Over the past month I’ve been reading on and off a curious and strange or unusually written mystery story, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (one of the two pseudonyms of Elizabeth MacKintosh)

The above one of its many covers (having been published in many editions) captures the action and (for me) what’s central to the interest of the book: its self-reflexivity and presentations of different ways of telling supposedly truthful history in at first a playful way. The way the story is for about half the tale conducted. The level of language in which the book is written feels very simple but not the thoughts implied inside Alan Grant’s mind nor his and Tey’s narrator’s descriptions and imitations of kinds of history books. I chose this book as one of those I’d read for a planned course I’d teach in mystery-thriller-detective stories by women: see my A Tangent I cannot Resist: Women’s Detective Stories

The story is that Grant is a policeman-detective from Scotland Yard who has been badly hurt chasing a criminal (down a manhole?). He is bored in the hospital and looking for something to do. He is drawn towards Renaissance and Tudor history and after canvasing several fascinating figures (all women, Lucrezia Borgia, Elizabeth Tudor versus Mary Stuart), lands on the unsolved (as he sees it) mystery of of who killed the two young sons of Elizabeth Woodville by Edward IV — heirs to the throne upon his death. This is an old problem. As he puzzles this out, with main candidates being at first (but not for very long) Richard III or Henry VII (who took over the throne after Richard III was killed); we go through the whole Plantagenet York group (Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and wife, their grown sons, grandsons, various wives), not omitting the Lancastrians (Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, Margaret of Anjou &c).

Tey’s book’s story is told through characters, his friends, bringing him books of different types — each of which gives Josephine Tey and opportunity to imitate it — first silly history offered to children with child-like motives and pictures, all personalities, and then the opposite, fat tomes of small print where only large abstract causes and realities are discussed (hardly personalities), then one of his historical fiction-romances centered on Cecilly Neville, Duchess of York (wife of the above Plantagenet), entitled The Rose of Raby said to be by Evelyn Paine-Ellis (typical pseudonym down to not allowing the first name to be narrowly gendered). That’s the kind of title Philippa Gregory might give a book; in fact these kinds of books can be better than one thinks — as Tey through Grant implies. And then he gets to the “sainted” Thomas More’s “much respected” life of Richard of Gloucester. The fun is comparing the different kinds of truths and un-truths.

Sally Hawkins again, this time as Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, wife to the Duke Humphrey (Hugh Bonneville) — from The Hollow Crown

But you have to know the history to enjoy this kind of thing — partly because otherwise you would get immersed in notes at the book thick with names and differing explanations. Not entirely by chance I just happened to be re-watching the three Hollow Crown plays, TV productions made up of selections from Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays and most of Richard III, here called The Wars of the Roses — a really excellent close and yet accessible rendition, often shot on location. And I do know this history from previous reading and watching of costume drama, and at one time deciding to do my graduate work in the early modern period. I also happened to have been reading a book by Stephen Greenblatt called The Tyrant where he argues that one can read Shakespeare to learn about politics when a political order is falling apart. The Hollow Crown focuses on the Joan of Arc material in Shakespeare; Greenblatt focuses on Jack Cade’s rebellion and it’s striking how many parallels there are with January 6th …. Shakespeare wrote dramatic forms of historical fiction. And it’s historical fiction I’m interested in for real — for a book say. That’s probably why I chose Tey’s books as one of my candidates to teach for a course in women writing detective stories. But I digress in several ways at once.

For me the book began to fall off towards the end when I could see its thrust was to defend a thesis begun around the time of Horace Walpole and become a fervently believed in “truth” by Ricardians (they are called), especially in The Richard III Society. It is a daring book to make it about a man reading in bed, but the matter for me not endlessly intriguing enough. Suffice to say I am not convinced and found a good deal of special pleading and strained emphases. And nowadays, since Richard’s hacked-away and curved skeleton (he has scoliosis it is now felt) was found and re-buried in pomp, there has been a great deal of push back against the Ricardians, e.g., Tim Thornton, Jennifer Ouellette, “New Evidence Richard murdered his the princes in the tower.”; on the other hand, there’s The Vilification of Richard III by Vanessa Hatton.

One could go on very easily to many more essays on various POVs and the many involved characters/people. But I want tonight to again keep my promise to keep these blogs shorter and here dwell on a mostly upbeat film that just delighted me this afternoon, The Lost King, based on the life, character and books by and about Philippa Langley, the amateur historian, archeaologist and fervent fan of Richard III, who was the driving force responsible for digging up the remains of Richard III from a car park not far from Leicester Cathedral.

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Philippa standing up to Richard Buckley who does not want to dig in Trench 1 (where she thinks and it turns out Richard III’s remains are)

I am now prevented from praising it as strongly as I want to because in the spirit of all previous authorities like Thomas More, a new authority, the University of Leicester, and the central people (e.g., Richard Buckley, played in the film by Mark Addy) there who worked with or for, or ultimately dominated over Langley has come down hard against and pervasively complained loudly that the film falsifies their role. They name several untruths, like Buckley had just been unfunded by the university when Langley came to him with her fervent faith, like Richard Taylor (played by Lee Ingleby), a deputy registrar, who is presented as at first obstructing and in the end unfairly marginalizing and taking credit from Philippa — there is a list of these, as doubtless one can do for many a biopic (among them, Spike Lee’s epic heroic Malcolm X). The film, we are told, underplays the number of women involved. It seems most, maybe nearly all of the major news outlets is carrying this slant on the film, with strong laments that now we cannot enjoy it as we would have, were it not so marred: “Cracking film totally tainted,” “Legal action likely,”, from the University, “Setting the Record straight,”, and “Sally saves the day.” Who can like a film that defames real living people who meant very well?

Deep fantasy

I began to wonder if Steve Coogan has enemies (joke alert); he indirectly defended his film in one of the videos released showing the principals doing promotional shots as about a “humble ordinary person” challenging authorities; she is conceived as a disabled woman (with ME) whose first identification with Richard III comes from her having been demoted because she cannot do the things others can; we see her husband is living with another woman when the movie begins — as the trajectory of her success moves on, he moves back and begins to support her. She starts out as fitting with misfits (the way the Richard III society members are at first presented). This is a common role for Hawkins — she was a nearly hysterical Anne Elliot, twisted with grief, rejection, isolation, put-upon, underdog (parallel with Fanny Price) — I loved it myself.

Here, as in those Austen heroines, but not so poignantly, she wins out, almost, and in the academic world, archaeological or historical-literay in my experience, those w/o titles, the right school and “mentors” behind them are erased, at best condescended to. My instincts and 27 and more years of experience of university people lead me to distrust their account however in what can be documented theirs might win out in a court of law. I can see from wikipedia and the accounts of Langley’s publications and networking, she is far more middle class, self-assertive and altogether entrepreneurial – which would make sense. Philippa Langley have had to be to have gotten various people to dig up the parking lot. The film exaggerated at both ends — as well as providing her with a (as the actor called the ghost king) an imaginary friend for support she desperately needed.

Richard III’s revenant (Harry Lloyd), imaginary supportive companion to Philippa Langley (our Sally)

So in order to praise the film if you are not to be disrespected you’ve got to cope these (ugly?) departures from truth; what interests me is other biopics have as many and yet are not attacked — The Lost King film-makers made the mistake of attacking an university whose presence in the world is not dependent on money but respect and reputation for integrity.

But I also think they are going after this film because they think they can — because Langley was/is an eccentric woman. The whole thesis that Richard III is this unfairly maligned king is very weak even if Thomas More was writing propaganda on behalf of the Tudors. So the way to write it up if you want to praise it is to begin there, an ironic parallel between R3 and Langley. Another is to take a post-modern stance: let us be sceptical of all assertions, and all individual certitudes, all of them slanted by self. There are several suggestions in the material on Richard III, The Daughter of Time and now this film that it was suspected for quite a time that the body-skeleton was in that vicinity so Langley’s thesis was not some wild dream no one ever thought of — all writing just now are all insisting that the very improbable event that Langley’s instinct the body was beneath an R for reserved was absolutely true. They are happy to give her full credit for that. So since no one is attacking that I wonder about that equally.

John Langley (Steve Coogan) and Philippa walking and (she) anxiously talking

It is a very enjoyable film. Beautifully filmed, buoyant with relief and release when Philippa is vindicated, Hawkins and Steve Coogan manage to convey a couple slowly coming together once again, and when we hear that hint that Benedict Cumberbatch Himself who played Richard III in The Hollow Crown) will be at the funeral ceremonies, just that needed thin frisson comes through.

Ellen

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OLLI at Mason: Contemporary Italian Memoirs & Novels: 2023 spring online

A spring syllabus for reading a group of 20th & 21st century Italian novels and memoirs

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Thursday afternoons, 2:15 to 3:40 pm, March 30 to May 18, 2023
F405Z Contemporary Italian Memoirs and Novels
8 sessions online (location site) : 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

To begin the process of registration go to:  https://olli.gmu.edu/

Description of Course:

In this course, participants will read a group of Italian works with a view to understanding the culture, history and politics of Italy over the last hundred years or so. We’ll read Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir, The Family Lexicon (1963) which takes place in Turin and Rome before, during, and after WWII; Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of his time in exile in WWII (1947); Primo Levi’s Periodic Table (1984), a witty semi-chemical memoir; Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Quartet books (2012); and poetry, essays & non-fiction life-writing, and online films (The Bicycle Thieves, Bitter Rice, & film adaptations of our books) as relevant. The course will have as subthemes Italian-Jewish writers, the holocaust and WW2, women’s and life-writing, post WW2 Italy in films.

Required Books:

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, translated by Jenny McPhee, afterword by Peg Boyers. New York Review of Books Classics paperback. ISBN 978-59017-838-6
Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Fenaye, introduction Mark Rotella. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-53009-2
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. NY: Schocken Books. ISBN0-8052-1041-5
Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2012. ISBN 978-1-60945-078-6

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. The schedule is not cast in cement; if we find we need more or less sessions for any particular text or topic, we can be flexible.

Mar 30: 1st week: Introduction: Italian Literature and history. Ginzburg & women’s writing. Begin The Family Lexicon

Apr 6: 2nd week: The Family Lexicon & excerpts (non-fiction life-writing) from The Little Virtues and A Place to Live.
Apr 13: 3rd week: Carlo Levi & WW2 & fascism. Christ Stopped at Eboli

Apr 20: 4th week: Christ Stopped at Eboli. 1943: German take-over, Willing Executioners,  the Risorgimento, roots of fascism.
Apr 27: 5th week: Holocaust Memoirs. An excerpt from Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After. Iris Origo’s Diary. Primo Levi, Post-WW 2 Italy. Begin The Periodic Table
May 4: 6th week: The Periodic Table.
May 11: 7th week: Post WW2 Italy: Neo-realistic film: Vittoria De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (steams online at Amazon Prime, Criterion Collection &c) . Elena Ferrante & My Brilliant Friend
May 18: 8th week: My Brilliant Friend and Bitter Rice (streams online at Amazon Prime) People could watch the first season on the 2019 TV film serial, My Brilliant Friend (also on Amazon Prime, Criterion Collection &c).  Last Thoughts.

Suggested direct supplementary reading:

Boyers, Peg. Hard Bread [A memoir of the life and writing of Natalia Ginzburg through poetry]. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Chihaya, Sarah, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richardson. The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. NY: Columbia UP, 2020.
Ginzburg, Natalia. The Little Virtues, trans. Dick Davis. NY: Arcade Press, 1985. A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays, ed, trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2002.
Gordon, Robert S, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Cambridge, 2007.
Ferrante, Elena. The Lost Daughter; the other three novels of the Quartet, all trans Ann Goldstein. Europa, 2006, 2012-15.
Jeannet, A.M., and G. Sanguinetti Katz, ed. Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Levi, Carlo. Fleeting Rome: In Search of La Dolce Vita, trans. Antony Shugaar. Padstowe, Cornwall: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Another meditative travel-residence memoir.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz; The Reawakening; The Drowned and the Saved. Trans Stuart Wolf. Touchstone and Einaudi. 1958, 1965, 1989.

Further list of good books by and about Italian literature & a French TV serial (germane)

Aleramo, Sibilla. A Woman, trans Rosalind Delamar. Univ of California at Berkeley. 1980
Banti, Anna (pseudonym for Lucia Lopresi). Artemisia, trans Shirley D’arcia Caracciolo. Bison (University of Nebraska), 1998.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Bondanella, Peter and Andrea Ciccarelli, edd. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel. Cambridge UP, 2003.
Baranski, Zygmunt and Rebecca West, edd. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Cambridge UP, 2001
A French Village. Developed by Frederic Krivine, Phillipe Triboit. Various writers and directors. 7 year French serial set in occupied Vichy France, 1941-1946, with fast forward to 1975; 2002. Amazon prime, also to buy as DVD sets
Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, introd. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, trans. Guido Walman. NY: Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-375-71479-5
Moorehead, Caroline.  A Bold and Dangerous Family (a history of a family who fought against fascism in Italy), A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism – she has a number of books on fascism and the resistance in Europe, all very good. A Train in Winter is her most famous – it exists as an audiobook.
Origo, Iris. A Chill in the Air, An Italian War Diary, 1939-40, introd. Lucy Hughes Hallett; War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, introd. Virginia Nicolson. NYRB Classics, 2017, 2018.
Ortese, Anna Maria. Evenings Descends Upon The Hills: Stories from Naples, trans Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee. Pushkin & New Vessel, 2018
Parks, Tim. Italian Ways, A Literary Tour of Italy. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Books, 2016.
Quasimodo, Salvatore. The selected Writings, ed., introd., trans. Allen Mandelbaum. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1960.
Sullam, Simon Elvis. The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy. trans. Oona Smyth and Claudia Patane. Princeton UP, 2018
Testaferri, Ada, ed. Donna: Women in Italian Culture. University of Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto UP, 1989.
Tuck, Lily. A Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Harper Collins, 2008.
Weaver, William, ed. Introd. Open City. Begins with a long fine essay on literary and political life in Italy, especially in the north, and then is a book of excerpts from books by the Italian writers in Post-War Rome.

Map of Italy

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Women’s Holocaust Memoirs

Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, translated from the French by Rose Lamont (a trilogy)

You cannot just add women in or replace men with women and stir — and assume you have the same situation — Elizabeth Minnick, Transforming Knowledge

Dear friends and readers,

Over the past month I attended via zoom, a four session class called Women’s Holocaust Memoirs, led by two professors (of women’s studies among other things), Evi Beck and Angelika Bammer. We read the above stunning, astonishing literary masterpiece, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After (published 1965-71), two hardly less extraordinary brilliant fragmentary-seeming texts, Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener Rue Labat, translated (also) from the French by Ann Smock (published 1993); Carolina Klop’s (pseudonym Carl Friedman), Nightfather, translated from the Dutch by Arnold and Erica Pomerans (published 1991), and the much better known retrospective meditative (insightful, highly intelligent but still angry) Ruth Kluger’s inclusive Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (published in German 1992; revised and published in English 2001).

Kluger reading aloud the first paragraph of her memoir ….

I was deeply moved by Delbo’s trilogy especially (it is comparable to Primo Levi’s If This Be Man, and The Truce), educated into the frighteningly horrible (hardly believable) worlds of the WW2 Slave Labor and Death Camps by the first and part of the second volume; by Kluger’s Still Alive made to think about in an unsentimental frame of mind barbaric abuse, torture and killing of people against a backdrop of our common amoral society. Let us not forget how fascism targets many groups besides the “racially stigmatized” (here Jews): Delbo was a political prisoner; disabled and LGBTQ people, socialists were all enslaved and/or murdered.

It was something of a privilege to have the company of the two professors; Evi Beck was born in Austria in 1933 and lived under the Nazi regime; she has been teaching and writing in the area of women’s studies from the 1970s; Angelika Bammer, born of German parents, has made holocaust as well as women’s studies and comparative literature her life’s work. The perspective of the class was that of a female (or feminine, feminist) lens (very like what I had been teaching over at OLLI at AU, in The Heroine’s Journey): most discussion of the holocaust is partly based on men’s memoirs; when the Holocaust Museum in DC was opened, there was a resistance against even including women’s memoirs.

We discussed women’s histories, e.g., Marian Kaplan’s Between Dignity and Despair, a history of Jewish life from the time the edicts of restriction began until the time the arrests started, and people began to flee, go into hiding: why did these people behave the way they did? And we saw all month, women’s memoirs differ considerably from men’s in experience, in artful patterns, in themes, attitudes, tropes, most of which I was outlining in my course using very different books (an anthology is by Myra Goldenberg, Same Horrors, Different Hells). Joan Ringelheim can be found on YouTube discussing how women did in the long term; conditions were different, treatment (rape, forced prostitution, pregnancies, children with them)

The mother-daughter pattern is overtly central to two of these books: Rue Ordoner Rue Labat and Still Alive.  (It also becomes central in Christa Wolf’s German-centered account of her childhood in Nazi Germany and during the war, Patterns of Childhood; Wolf’s book includes a flight from the Russians during their invasion of Germany). The mother-daughter pattern serves as a paradigm of oppression in these Kofman and Kluger.  Kofman’s book tells of her mother’s fierce struggle to keep her daughter, Sarah, with her. Ruth’s mother also refused to allow her daughter to try to escape with the help of strangers. Mrs Kofman, though, has violently to wrest her daughter back from a French woman who rescued and hid them both, and then begins in effect to re-make Sarah into a French child and daughter of hers. The French woman was much kinder in behavior, less domineering; Sarah’s mother (often in an hysteria) repeatedly beats her. Kofman’s father was a rabbi, and we see among Sarah’s mother’s frustrations was her husband leaned her on, demanding things she could not produce, while himself avoiding decision-making.

Kluger herself discusses her book on YouTube: https://www.c-span.org/video/?168914-1/still-alive-holocaust-girlhood-remembered

What is most distinctive about Still Alive is the honesty with which Kluger characterizes the people she meets; it is a memoir written many years later (as the other three were not), no false pieties; she tells what life under fascism felt like, and the hardships and indifference refugees from the camps had to confront and cope with upon returning to what had been a home or (more common for Jewish people), emigrating elsewhere. Kluger remains bitter against her mother’s values (very conventional), those of the society that permitted (I’d say even encouraged) the Nazi rise, and hardly changed its values and norms at all once the immediate aftermath of desperate need and collapse of nation-states was over. Both Kluger and Delbo astonished me with their insights into the relationship of trauma, depression, and self-destruction; why people want to destroy themselves after such an experience. Both have the wide perspective of before, during and life long afterwards (much like the powerful, truthful and great French serial on the Vichy regime in France, A French Village)

Nightfather centers on the father of a family who has returned from the camps and remains obsessed by his memories; the camp experience is continually present in his mind; everything everyone around him says or does he responds to with comparative comments that are comical (a good deal of sardonic humor in the book), angry, sad, traumatizing; he is a shattered man who has to be taken to an asylum for ten years. Klop is very equivocal about her gender and feels a stranger vis-a-vis her older brothers. Nightfather is a book whose focus are three siblings, with the mother there as a stabilizing force (a real heroine who we hear studies the Odyssey). You can apply to it Adrienne Rich’s

“With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
From where does your strength come?
I think somehow, somewhere
every poem of mine must repeat those questions
which are not the same. There is a whom, a where
that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given
in the beginning we grasp whatever we can
to survive”

The two fragmentary-seeming (they are very artful) and short books, Nightfather and Rue Ordoner Rue Labat expose the falseness of what is said to be heroic behavior; the cost of it when it conforms to violence, coolness, of who is considered worthy. Both were written long after the experience; Kofman killed herself the year after she published hers, though like Klop (Friedman) and Kluger, she rose to a respected position as a writer and in universities. The impulse to run away is powerful in these fragments. At the same time, again and again there is a terror at separation from those your identity is bound up with; one reaction is dissociation, boundaries around you dissolving; another is to try to vanish.

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

I feel awe in the presence of Christine Delbo’s books (you see the second just above): Auschwitz and After, the one we read, is so beautifully written, artfully shaped continually, the experiences so beyond real comprehension for those who have not known what she has but made almost visceral and felt and re-lived by the way she weaves present, past, her own story in prose pieces of one to four pages with the stories of the 238 women who was brought with her to Auschwitz (49 survived); all interspersed with poetry.

There are three parts: None of us will return has the hardest material to read, graphic and unflinching descriptions include a SS person sic-cing a raging dog on a prisoner. The brutality in Auschwitz is accompanied by mockery; bestial criminals whipped, starved, continually screamed at, and did all they could to shatter their victims. It is written in a relentless present, breathless, and as the scope expands, you feel you are getting a distillation . The first half of Useless Knowledge is about day-to-day life in the next two camps Delbo found herself taken to, both considerably less harsh than Auschwitz (or she would never have survived); the second half has the Swedish Red Cross coming to the camp as the Germans are defeated and flee in early 1945. Delbo’s first response when she finds herself free and in a building she is supposed to integrate herself with other in is utter bewilderment, an inability to function without someone helping her. She cannot take in ordinary life any more. She cries and cries. The third part The Measure of Our Days tells of her life afterwards mixed with her re-enacting the lives of those 238 women in the camps who died, and those who survived (though made into different people). How time passes as people live and morph on. As with Delbo’s other book, Convoy to Auschwitz, Delbo commemorates every woman she can in the third part of her book. The coda is a series of poignant poems which urge the reader and all to live on, to find some joy, to dance, to sing.

The themes include the ambiguities of the ways in which memories work in the human mind; the creativity of the imagination given the slightest opportunity (in Part Two the women put on a play by Moliere); the idea that Delbo has died and it is a copy of herself, a mask you are meeting and she is getting through the world in; storytelling itself in the book is self-conscious or self-aware. She uses the “we” for her central voice; she addresses the reader as “you.” Terrifying quiet experiences include the finding of a teddy bear as a present during Christmas and realizing it is leftover from a child see hugging it intensely before she was taken with her other to be gassed to death. We see repeatedly how holding themselves together as a group, by looking out for one another, remaining tightly together insofar as this is possible, they are enabled to survive. Primo Levi similarly survived though his relationships, but he presents himself as an individual. Delbo thinks of herself as embedded with others, but she also shows herself ready to die at moments, and then comes along someone with protection of some sort for her space, a shield, a hand held out.

On Convoy To Auschwitz

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

The two professors felt what tied all four books together was the focus in them on relationships, on what the people did for one another, what they did with one another, the way relationships sustain and destroy: the violence people can inflict (emotional is included here) and comradeship. The books do not tell us of the worlds of the Nazi guards; the emphasis is wholly on those experiencing not implementing. Intimacy is a way of asserting personal life. For women especially the SS demands that they stand naked so they can be assessed as to which to kill and which to allow to live on; such scenes in these books are unforgettable.

The course ended on them reading aloud recipes from an anthology called In Memory’s Kitchen: this consists of recipes women written down by undernourished, and starving women in a Czech camp: robust, rich, and once beloved dishes.

And then we listened to one of the marching songs of the Partisans (resistance groups), an anthem for the survivors. It was a song sung in German (if I’m not mistaken); but what I found on the Internet is the more commonly known French one:

Ellen

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On being a Janeite

Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood writing to her mother (1995 S&S)

The idea that an Austen character influenced and carried on influencing us is, to my mind & out of my experience, the mark of the “Janeite.” Anyway I dream/think this. It’s a belief I like and almost believe in that when I was in my later teens Elinor Dashwood was a figure for me I could try to emulate, imitate analogously and in so doing save/rescue myself. Her self-control, her prudence, her thinking about things and for herself however she might behave in accordance with apparent or pretended-to social norms (=social cant). As fanciful perhaps I see her in somewhat of that light still now I’m in my 70s. It’s called a role model except I don’t believe people read this way or for role models …

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood towards the end of the story, looking out at the sea, enduring (2008 S&S)

Ellen

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A winter syllabus 2023: The Heroine’s Journey at OLLI at Mason online

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: 4 Thursdays midday, 11:50-1:15 pm online,
F405Z: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course:

We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.

Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)

Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):

Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2

Strongly suggested films:

Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one.
Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD

Kauffmann, Angelica: Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century fine painting)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion

Jan 26th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)

Feb 2nd: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

Feb 9th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.

Feb 16th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)

First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)

Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a Thousand Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):

Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.

Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)

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Christmas in the Poldark World brought back (or forward) from December 2017

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) singing, after Christmas dinner (2015 Poldark, episode 4)
Someone — a Latin poet — had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come — last chapter of Ross Poldark)

Ross (Aidan Turner) with Aunt Agatha (Caroline Blakiston) at dinner (again end of Ross Poldark)

Gentle Friends and devoted readers,

I have said I mean someday or time to return to the Poldark novels and write half a book on them (the other half to be on the first four Outlander novels). One of the deep pleasures of Graham’s series is his recreation of the rituals of the era in terms of feelings then and feelings now. There was nothing he enjoyed better to do than recreate Christmas as a way of marking time and showing the community getting together in however compromised terms. So this year instead of bringing back (as I have in other years) Jane Austen Christmas blogs, I’m bringing back one (2017) from the Poldark novels. Here is a second (2018).

I’ve been rereading the novels again, and have confirmed an old memory that while Christmas is in itself not valued for any kind of religious belief, a number of the novels end around Christmas time with the characters gathering together to enact a yearly ritual, and memories, and talk emerges far more for real at moments than other times of year. Some of these endings are melancholy sweet, strained, or near breaking point: Ross Poldark, Demelza and Warleggan (1st, 2nd & 4th Poldark books) respectively. At the close of Demelza:

“They watched the scene on the beach.
‘I shan’t have to finish that frock for Julia now,’ she said. ‘It was that dainty too.’
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you will be catching cold.’
‘No. I am quite warm, Ross. Let me stay a little longer in the sun.

Some are bitter, and then the emphasis is on winter itself, December into January, dark, cold, bleak or wild: The Angry Tide (the 7th) when Elizabeth has just died.

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow! It’s only now that can ever be, at any one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask … Demelza to Ross (last page of The Angry Tide).

Some are quiet-reflective, The Miller’s Dance and The Loving Cup (the 9th and 10th books). In The Twisted Sword (the 11th), the deep tragedy of Jeremy’s death continues to the end, only lifted somewhat by the birth of Lady Harriet Warleggan and then Cuby Poldark’s baby, while Demelza keeps the festival.

Deliver us from swords & curs — The Twisted Sword

Lastly, Bella (the 12th) just after Valentine’s death and Ross’s nightmare, the characters all return to Cornwall for Christmas. We pass a bleak Christmas in the second half of the novel Jeremy Poldark, but it is not emphatic, just part of the year made much harder because of desperate conditions during this festival time, and we observe Christmas more emphatically in The Black Moon during the birth of Clowance when the news comes to Nampara that Dwight Enys is still alive.

I’ve only followed the devices and desires of my own heart … Demelza, again the close)

So only four novels do not end in December/January or Christmas: Jeremy Poldark (a christening), The Black Moon (very bitter at the close), The Four Swans(very uncertain, all the women having been forced into bad choices), and The Stranger from the Sea (an uneasy unsettling).

A painting of Cornwall, the shore for fishing, early 20th century impressionism (photographed from a visit to a Cornish museum, summer 2016)

As important, all the novels are carefully keyed to seasonal time-lines, from autumn to winter, winter to spring and summer again; attention is paid to the relationship of what’s happening to daily customs, agricultural and other rhythms, the weather, and Christmas is part of this, and made more of when it coincides with some crisis. I conclude the natural world as central to human existence (and Graham’s love of Cornwall), and holiday rituals meant a good deal to Graham for their creation of a sense of community and humane comradeship, for their enacting memory and for hope of renewal.

Stanhope Forbes, Fisherman’s wife (Cornish painter, 1890s – 1910s)

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Even among my nearest and dearest there is no transference — can be no transference — of experience. One can feel empathy for someone suffering, but one cannot feel the suffering. We are all alone —- desperately alone. What are we in this world? A conjunction of subjective impressions making up something that is accepted as reality — Graham, Memoirs of a Private Man

One reason these patterns may not have been noticed is they are not observed in the either the older or newer serial drama. When Christmas does emphasize something special in the story at the moment (new marriage, desperate poverty, worry over the life of an imprisoned friend), then it’s there. But not the seasons and no sense of a sequence of customs to which Christmas belongs for themselves. The interest in Cornwall is decorative; in the older, there is reveling in the place, in the recent they attend to the workaday world.

We don’t have adaptations past The Stranger from the Sea for either series, but looking at the older 1975-76, 1977-78, the only transitional moments from one novel to the next where this kind of coda is observed is in a mid-book, the bare bleak half-starving Christmas from Jeremy Poldark, complete with a family dinner, caroling, Demelza wanting to ask the Brodugans for money).

Bare strained family dinner (1975-76 Poldark, Part 11, Episode 3)

At Nampara, Demelza (Angharad Rees), pouring port, asks Ross (Robin Ellis) why cannot they ask other friends for money (1975-76, Poldark Part 11, Episode 4)

One could cite the mood and bleak outdoors in the final episode of the second (and as it turned out) last season (1978), The Angry Tide, which ended, with Demelza and Ross looking at their children holding hands, and George grieving at the window from which the camera takes us to gaze at wild waves and rocks. Except it is not Christmas nor December as it explicitly is in the novel. A good deal of the original series was filmed on sets, and the focus was strongly on particular personalities in a story. So even just two scenes from the older Poldark show the intense attention paid to interweaving a Christmas piece with the realities of the characters’ dispositions, circumstances at each moment.

Christmas dinner at Trenwith (2015 Poldark, episode 4)

The recent 2015-16, and now 2017: in the first season (2015), the fourth episode near the end corresponds closely to the end of Ross Poldark, Ross and Demelza now Poldark go to Trenwith for a visit and (as it turns out temporary) reconciliation, and details from the book are dramatized, such as Demelza’s singing (above), though not Elizabeth on the harp.

Then again in the second season (2016), scenes corresponding to the observation of Christmas during a hard time in Jeremy Poldark, and the third season (2017), scenes corresponding to The Black Moon and placed just before the rescuing of Dwight Enys where there is a quiet Nampara Christmas and Caroline and Demelza and Verity seek funds at a party.

For all the rest while we might have a funeral at a close of an episode (we do twice, Jim Carter and then Julia), nothing is made of the year’s seasonal patterns nor Christmas. The perpetual coming out on the cliffs is not keyed to any season, any activity but the openings of the episodes at the mines. Scenes are not complexly nuanced in quite the way they were in the older series.

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Elizabeth Adele Armstrong Forbes, later 19th century woman painter in Cornwall, a Ring of Roses

What this suggests is how different are the rhythms and internal structures of the episodes of both Poldark film series from that of the novels: the exception in the series is Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the first iteration (1975, 1977), and Jeremy Poldark and The Black Moon in the second (2016, 2017). But also how important season, time, holiday ritual was to Graham and has not been to the any of the film-adapters of his work thus far.

A curtain of mist hung over the Black Cliffs at the further end of Hendrawna Beach, most of it caused by spray hitting the tall rocks and drifting before the breeze. There was a heavy swell which reached far out to sea, and a couple of fishing boats from St Ann’s had gone scudding back to the safety of the very unsafe har¬bour. Gulls were riding the swell, lifting high and low as the waves came in; occasionally they took to the air in a flurry of flapping white when a wave unexpectedly spilled its head. No one yet expected rain: that would be tomorrow. The sun was losing its brilliance and hung in the sky like a guinea behind a muslin cloth.
Clowance squinted up at the weather. ‘Have you got a watch?’ ‘No. Not one that goes.’ — Bella

It might be objected, Does any movie? some do, and some film adaptations. One set that comes to mind are the film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, especially the 1996 ITV by Andrew Davies (with Kate Beckinsale as Emma, Mark Strong as Mr Knightley, Samantha Morton, Harriet) and the 209 BBC Emma by Sandy Welch (with Romola Garai as Emma, Johnny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley, Tamsin Grieg as Miss Bates), keep to seasons and emphasize Christmas or the winter holiday, snow. Have a look here: Jane Austen’s Perception of Christmas. And now Graham:

So they all went to look, at least as far as the stile leading down to the beach)· further it was unsafe to go. Where the beach would have been at any time except the highest of tides) was a battlefield of giant waves. The sea was washing away the lower sandhills and the roots of marram grass. As they stood there a wave came rushing up over the rough stony ground and. licked at the foot of the stile) leaving a trail of froth to overflow and smear their boots. Surf in the ordinary sense progresses from deep water to shallow) losing height as it comes. Today waves were hitting the rocks below Wheal Leisure with such weight that they generated a new surf running at right angles to the flow of the sea) with geysers of water spouting high from the collisions. A new and irrational surf broke against the gentler rocks below the Long Field. Mountains of spume collected wherever the sea drew breath) and then blew like bursting shells across the land. The sea was so high there was no horizon and the clouds so low that they sagged into the sea (from The Angry Tide, quoted by Graham at the opening of Poldark’s Cornwall, 1983 version).

This matters because these books are in the peculiar position of fake knowledge. A lot of people think they know them because they’ve seen these film adaptations. Others may read the books after the adaptations and have their understanding framed by the films. What they remember is what the film emphasized. There is a long respectable history of publication for the first four books from 1945 to 1953; and the second trilogy (the novels of the 1970s, Black Moon, Four Swans, Angry Tide) have been in but watched partly as a result of the films and seen through the films. The last five are much less well-known.

Many classics are in effect in this position: far far more people saw the film Wuthering Heights in 1939 than had read Emily Bronte’s book in the previous 150 years of publication and availability. But the Brontes have true respectability and people went on to read WH and other Bronte books; they have now gotten to Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the film adaptation was made as a result of Bronte popularity. That’s not the case with Graham’s books. For my part I’d love to know what sales of the books have been like over the past 60 years and have a way of measuring how much that reflects actual readership.

To return to the book’s several Christmases; this first one has the depth of particularity and realism. I have not begun to go into the feeling Ross Poldark and Elizabeth have for one another, how suddenly embittered Ross appears because life has not gone as he had wished, and the hurt Demelza feels, caught up in these two stills from the 1975-76 serial

Real feelings during these ritual times as are found in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale

On New Year’s Eve I will recreate the 2018 blog I wrote concentrating on just two of the Christmases across the books.

Ellen

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My review of the Cambridge edition of the works of Anne Finch

Said to be a portrait (miniature) of Anne Finch; the portrait resembles in features a miniature of her father …

Friends and readers,

Here is the second paper that connects to the EC/ASECS meeting this year which I didn’t go to. It is a review-essay which I worked on and off for 2 years or so, and was published in the Intelligencer that was published just before the meeting, NS Volume 35, No 2, September 2022, pp 25-35. It’s obviously too long and complicated for a blog, so here too go over to academia.edu to read it:

Editing the Writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Digital photo from Northamptonshire MS

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967): a courageous Persian woman

Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967)

“If my poems, as you say, have an aspect of femininity, it is of course quite natural. After all, fortunately, I am a woman. But if you speak of artistic merits, I think gender cannot play a role. In fact to even voice such a suggestion is unethical. It is natural that a woman, because of her physical, emotional, and spiritual inclinations, may give certain issues greater attention, issues that men may not normally address. I believe that if those who choose art to express their inner self, feel they have to do so with their gender in mind, they would never progress in their art — and that is not right. So when I write, if I keep thinking, oh I’m a woman and I must address feminine issues rather than human issues, then that is a kind of stopping and self-destruction. Because what matters, is to cultivate and nourish one’s own positive characteristics until one reaches a level worthy of being a human. What is important is the work produced by a human being and not one labelled as a man or a woman. When a poem reaches a certain level of maturation, it separates itself from its creator and connects to a world where it is valid based on its own merits.”[10][11] Emphasizing human issues, she also calls for a recognition of women’s abilities that goes beyond the traditional binary oppositions …” Forough Farrokhzad (from an interview)

I am delighted and honored to say that tonight we have a guest blogger who sent to Wompo (a list for and about women’s poetry) and now has given me permission to put here an (in effect) foremother poet posting.

By Farideh Hassanzadeh.. For her poetry and more about her: she is also a translator and freelance journalist. On Poem Hunter

Farideh began with one of Farrokhzad’s poems (in translation)

It is Only Sound That Remains

Why should I stop, why?
the birds have gone in search
of the blue direction.
the horizon is vertical, vertical
and movement, fountain-like;
and at the limits of vision
shining planets spin.
the earth in elevation reaches repetition,
and air wells
changes into tunnels of connection;
and day is a vastness,
which does not fit into narrow mind
of newspaper worms.

why should I stop?
the road passes through the capillaries of life,
the quality of the environment
in the ship of the uterus of the moon
will kill the corrupt cells.
and in the chemical space after sunrise
there is only sound,
sound that will attract the particles of time.
why should I stop?

what can a swamp be?
what can a swamp be but the spawning ground
of corrupt insects?
swollen corpses scrawl the morgue’s thoughts,
the unmanly one has hidden
his lack of manliness in blackness,
and the bug… ah,
when the bug talks,
why should I stop?
Cooperation of lead letters is futile,
it will not save the lowly thought.
I am a descendant of the house of trees.
breathing stale air depresses me.
a bird which died advised me to
commit flight to memory.
the ultimate extent of powers is union,
joining with the bright principle of the sun
and pouring into the understanding of light.
it is natural for windmills to fall apart.

why should I stop?
I clasp to my breast
the unripe bunches of wheat
and breastfeed them

sound, sound, only sound,
the sound of the limpid wishes
of water to flow,
the sound of the falling of star light
on the wall of earth’s femininity
the sound of the binding of meaning’s sperm
and the expansion of the shared mind of love.
sound, sound, sound,
only sound remains.

in the land of dwarfs,
the criteria of comparison
have always traveled in the orbit of zero.
why should I stop?
I obey the four elements;
and the job of drawing up
the constitution of my heart
is not the business
of the local government of the blind.

what is the lengthy whimpering wildness
in animals sexual organs to me?
what to me is the worm’s humble movement
In its fleshy vacuum?
the bleeding ancestry of flowers
has committed me to life.
are you familiar with the bleeding
ancestry of the flowers?

Forough Farrokhzad was born in Tehran into a middle class family of seven children. She attended public schools through the ninth grade, thereafter received some training in sewing and painting, and married when she was seventeen. Her only child, the boy addressed in “A Poem for you,” was born a year later. Within less than two years after that, her marriage failed, and Farrokhzad relinquished her son to her ex-husband’s family in order to pursue her calling in poetry and independent life style. She clearly voices her feelings in the mid-1950s about conventional marriage, the plight of women in Iran, and her own situation as a wife and mother no longer able to live a conventional life in such poems as “The Captive,” “The Wedding Band,” “Call to Arms,” and “To My Sister.”

As a divorcee poet in Tehran, Farrokhzad attracted much attention and considerable disapproval. She had several short lived relationships with men-“The Sin” describes one of them,–, found some respite in a nine-month trip to Europe, and in 1958 met Ebrahim Golestan (b. 1922), a controversial film-maker and writer with whom she established a relationship that lasted until her death in an automobile accident at thirty-two years of age in February 1967.

Iranian Culture (A Persianist View), Michael C. Hillmann (translator, editor) page. From an Interview by Farideh of Larissa Shmailo (the translator), p 149

Dear Farideh:

Forrokhzad’s imagery is strong and uncompromising. I hear this poem aloud, spoken with force: “Why should I stop?” the poet queries, when around her is sound, the capillaries and cells and sperm become music in verse. Proclaiming “the bleeding ancestry of flowers,” the poet takes on the entire natural world and the cosmos, “shining planets” and the “uterus “of the moon and the human body. We follow her invitation to the motion of the horizon and the dead bird which taught her flight. Birds, worms, and “day is a vastness.”-this poem awakens us to the splendor of the variegated universe. This is an exciting voice which should not have been stopped at such an early age. Why should it have stopped?

Thanks so much for sharing!

Love,
Larissa

Here too Wendy Varaman’s interview with of Farideh:

When I first encountered the poems of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, I immediately thought of Sylvia Plath.

Here, for example, are the opening lines of “Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season” (trans., Michael C. Hillmann):

And this is I
a woman alone
at the threshold of a cold season
at the beginning of understanding
the polluted existence of the earth
and the simple and sad pessimism of the sky
and the incapacity of these concrete hands.

To what extent do you think it is useful to link these two women, both of whom died tragically in their early ۳۰’s during the cold month of February, each apparently still at the mercy of love and in a white-hot fervor of writing? Are women poets in Iran and the United States today more similar to each other or more different?

Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi:

Even Death in a cold season and at the peak of Forough’s creativity is not a good reason to find much resemblance between these two women poets. Sylvia killed herself because she was suffering from the betrayal of her husband. She was a faithful wife and a mother in love with her children. Forough left her husband and her little son to find her fate and mate in poetry. Regrettably, feminists and antireligious people in Iran and overseas, try to introduce Forough as a victim of a patriarchal religious society. It is not true. They claim she was forced by her father to marry in her teens, but now everybody knows that she threatened her parents to commit suicide if they don’t let her marry the man she loved. They introduce her husband as a dogmatic man who didn’t let Forough write poetry and deprived her from her right as a mother to see her son.

Forough’s letters to her husband, published thirty years after her death by her son, prove that even after divorce she was deeply supported by her kind, generous, and loyal husband who never married again and devoted all his life to their son. He was himself a writer and painter.

As for her poetry, Forough s poems could make themselves free from personal problems and pay attention to the world around her, while Sylvia Plath’s poems speak of “self,” even when she writes about others. “Lack of love” for Forough, was a universal wound, not a personal pain:

And my wounds are all the wounds of love
I have piloted this wondering island
Through raging tempests and volcanoes
And disintegration was the secret of that unique being
Each little particle of which gave birth to the sun

I see more resemblance between Forough and Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Both women were more loyal to love than to the men of their life, and both of them were more devoted to the truth of poetry than to the reality of life. Yet let me admit that if Iran has one Forough Farrokhzad, America has many, many, many “Forough Farrokhzads.” As a translator of women’s poetry and world poetry, I can attest that North America and Latin America have the best women poets of the world” (Wendy Varaman)

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To which I can add:

A photograph of Farrokhzad

Thank you Farideh. I also like that photo on the cover of the DVD (her poetry read aloud).

I own another book of her poetry, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, introduced and chosen and translated by Elizabeth Gray, Jr (ISBN 978-0-8112-3165-7)

This slender book contains a short life of the poet who died so young: Farrokhzad had a difficult life; she was brave and took off from conventional ways and traveled and wrote and published and made films and lived intensely at the same time as she must have been strapped for money and subject to lots of abuse in the media of her country. I can understand the content better om the book I own. I am thinking the tradition of being so inexplicit comes from inhibition, a desire not to let your private life be vulnerable to ugly public arenas, especially when you are a woman

Honestly, I have trouble understanding such allusive poetry where we are given metaphoric images but they have little concrete explanation or referents. Farideh, I am wondering if there is a tradition for this kind of imagery but I can think of “middle east” (I don’t have the right word for it) poetry where the referent is obvious, e.g., Constantine Cavafy (a male Greek poet). I also understand the content in general of the book I own. I am thinking the tradition of being so inexplicit comes from inhibition, a desire not to let your private life be vulnerable to ugly public arenas, especially when you are a woman. Perhaps candor and explicitness, which would make the poetry more accessible, understandable, might lead to a prison sentence or death.

Gray tells of her own education in the US at Stanford; that in the 1970s she learned Persian. Here’s her website where you are told all her credentials

Farideh replied that most of Farrokhzad’s poems were simple [in diction]; in her final days she was more than a poet: she became a thinker and philosopher, and her poetry departed from Iranian traditions.

Here is the poem from this volume which provides the volume’s title:

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of a Cold Season

And here I am
a lonely woman
at the threshold of a cold season
coming to understand the earth’s contamination
and the elemental, sad despair of the sky
and the impotence of these concrete hands.

Time passed,
time passed and the clock chimed four times,
it chimed four times.

Today is the first day of winter,
I know the secret of the seasons
and understand the moments well.

The savior is asleep in his grave
and earth, the kind acceptor, earth,
invites me to peace.

Perhaps those two young hands were true, those two young hands
buried below ¸in the never ending snow
And next year, when spring
sleeps with the sky beyond the window
and shoots thrust from her body
the green shoots of empty branches
will blossom O my dearest one, my dearest only one

Let us believe in the beginning of a cold season

Farrokhzad also painted; this is from the wikipedia website

A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann’s A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry, was published in 1987.[5] Farzaneh Milani’s work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992) included a chapter about her. Abdolali Dastgheib, literary critic writer, published a critical review of Forough’s poems titled ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Farsi title پری کوچک دریا) (2006) in which he describes Forugh as a pioneer in modern Farsi poetry who symbolizes feminism in her work.[16] Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries about her life: The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004), and Sholeh Wolpé has written a short biography of Farrokhzad’s life in “in: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2007).

Posted by Ellen

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