“Top Girls” by Caryl Churchill
Poster from a University of Utah production (which unfortunately misspells the playwright's name)
I picked up the play “Top Girls” because two historical women who fascinate me, Isabella Bird and Lady Nijo, appear as characters.
Bird was a headstrong Victorian who wrote popular books about her travels across China, the Rockies, and beyond. Nijo fled a series of painful affairs at the Japanese court to become a traveling nun. (The Molten Notebook posts on their adventures are here and here.)
I sought out their books, Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains and Nijo’s Confessions, for reasons I can’t quite explain. It could just be the escapist fantasy of an office flunkey who thinks she’s too highbrow for Eat, Pray, Love or Under the Tuscan Sun.
As in the current bestsellers, these women took to the road in search of — what? Bird’s motives for gadding about were never clear to me; as far as I can tell, she just hated the cold and damp in Edinborough. She didn’t discover new places, just retrod the difficult paths. Nijo wanted to follow in the footsteps of a traveler-poet she’d read as a child, but when she leaves court, she seeks that highbrow world again at salons and meetings with a princess.
Why did they write, I wonder? I could take Dorothy Middleton’s explanation, in Victorian Lady Travellers, that Bird and others wanted to justify their travels by packing their books with facts for the folks back home; their work should be edifying, not frivolous. As for Nijo, the title of her memoir means “with nothing having been asked”; unlike her affairs with men who forced themselves on her, or the bastard children who were taken from her, her writing is something she gives of her own will. A sense of purpose, a sense of control over an uncontrollable life: these are reasons enough to write.
The question remains, why read them? I thought the British playwright Caryl Churchill might have an answer. Read more…
Doris Lessing on What to Read
Doris Lessing
Here is a wonderful passage from Doris Lessing’s 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never read anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down … Everywhere, if you keep your mind open,you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master.
Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught — you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people.
The Artist in American Society, the Formative Years
The Artist in American Society, the Formative Years: 1790-1960 by Neil Harris. (Goerge Braziller, 1966)
The colonial painter wasn’t so much an artist as an artisan. He painted signs, crockery, fire buckets, and anything else he could to make a living.
If he were particularly ambitious, he might farm himself out to small towns like Albany, NY, and offer to paint portraits for a reasonable fee, or send panoramas on tour with sideshow-type acts. If he succeeded in the minor leagues, he might try his hand in a big Eastern city like Boston, Philadelphia, or New York.
After the Revolutionary War, painting was impressed into the service of patriotism. The trouble with painting history in America was that scenes of speechifying or signing documents were not terribly exciting. Thrilling moments were often violent ones — certainly not the tension-in-repose of the Classical ideal.
Landscapes, it seems, became more prevalent during the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath as alternatives to the mechanized world. Interestingly enough, scenes of the cities where artists lived and worked were not painted until after the Civil War.
The Classical Ideal pursued through Romantic detail, the general revealed by the specific — history in the 18th century and nature in the 19th — this became the goal of the New World artist (15) Read more…
A Stiff Upper Lip, Without a Mustache
Mary Kingsley (1862-1900)
The “lady traveler” was something of a Victorian phenomenon. She shooed hippopotami with her parasol and bicycled across India in bloomers. A painter, collector, or just a wanderer, she cherished her tea after a camel ride. (Isabella Bird drank it from a beef tin with a one-eyed outlaw named Mountain Jim.)
Back home, if she were particularly famous, readers met her ship at the dock and crowded the lecture halls.
During the 40-odd years before the outbreak of the first World War, such genteel globetrotting reached almost epidemic proportions.
writes David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.
You might expect these women to be the grandmothers of today’s bestsellers like Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun, in which middle-aged women find renewal and self-fulfillment in foreign lands. Read more…
Ten Things to Know about the Mahabharata: #3
Singapore. Statue of Krishna as Vishnu in his divine form.
#3. The problem of violence and responsibility. To regain their kingdom, the Pandava brothers go to war.
At the close of the 18-day battle, the dead include their sons, cousins, guru, and a brother they never knew they had. Some didn’t even die a clean death. They were distracted by imitations of their son’s voices, shot while trying to free a chariot from the mud.
How does a reader come to terms with the carnage of the Kurukshetra War? Even the heroes have their doubts.
Overwhelmed by the prospect of killing his relatives, Arjuna lost the will to fight. He dropped his bow and turned to his chariot driver. “How can we be happy after killing our kinsmen, O Krishna?” In fighting for his country, he would lose the very people for whom he wanted to win it.
Little does he know that his chariot driver is an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The divine Krishna responds with a meditation on faith, right action, and the eternal soul.
Do your duty to the best of your ability, O Arjuna, with your mind attached to the Lord, abandoning worry and attachment to the results, and remaining calm in both success and failure.
His speech is known as the Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God, and is readily available as a book as in its own right. The 700-verse treatise, possibly a later addition to the Mahabharata, is a seminal work of Hindu philosophy. Along with the Vishnu Sahasranamam, a prayer spoken by a dying warrior, it forms the religious core of the epic.
The Mahabharata helps the reader see the cosmic forces at work on the battlefield. Dying there is the result of a series of actions in a man’s life, or a previous one. Some enemies were actually demons in human form that the gods wanted killed. Warriors are merely instruments of fate.
On a cosmic level, it all makes sense. Yet as the wives of the dead search the battlefield, the suffering doesn’t seem any less real.
Ten Things to Know about the Mahabharata: #4
Javanese shadow puppet of Karna, a character in the Mahabharata
4. Caste counts. Caste has a long, complex, and politically fraught history in India. This post merely outlines a few basics that are relevant to a reading of the Mahabharata.
Humans in the epic are born into a caste that determines their status and lifestyle. Caste resembles but is not quite the same as a social or feudal class. It determines the the jobs a character may hold, whom they may marry, and their duty toward members of other castes, among other things.
The castes you’ll encounter in the epic are mainly the kshatriya, who tend to be warrior and rulers, and the priestly brahmins.
A man of the kshatriya caste studies the art of weapons and statescraft; he’s likely to become a warrior or a ruler. His duties often include ruling justly, defending his kingdom, treating holy men with respect, and keeping his word. Many of the main characters, including the Pandava brothers and their cousins, belong to this caste.
A man of the priestly brahmin class studies the Vedas, or Sanskrit scriptures, from childhood, and officiates at religious rites. They lead ascetic lives of near-poverty and often live on donations of food. A notable brahmin in the epic is Vyasa, the sage who transcribes the Mahabharata as the god Ganesh tells it and appears as a character in the story.
Assumptions about caste are so strong that the warrior princes can disguise themselves by behaving like members of other castes. When they need to hide from spies, the warrior brothers dress as brahmins and beg for alms. This ploy succeeds until they hear of a demon who has been forcing villagers to sacrifice one of their youths for his supper. One brother, Bhima, is so outraged that he kills the demon, an act that unfortunately “outs” him as warrior. The brothers later conceal themselves by taking unusual jobs for warriors in a palace: a cook, an animal keeper, a lady-in-waiting, and so on. When the local prince goes to battle, though, the “lady-in-waiting” can’t help but take the field.
One can hardly identify a single attitude toward caste in the enormous, episodic work. It does, however, raise recurring questions. What happens when a man’s skills and aspirations appear to conflict with his birth? Drona, the heroes’ weapons instructor, also happens to be a brahmin; Vishwamitra, a kshatriya king, becomes a respected sage. Read more…
Quick Hit: Never Let Me Go (2003)
Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro captures the self-deception of men who grapple with personal responsibility amidst forces beyond their control. The perfect English butler in The Remains of the Day learns that his lord sympathizes with the Nazis. A Japanese propaganda painter fears that his wartime sympathies have damaging consequences in An Artist of the Floating World.
It would seem that his Never Let Me Go is in the same vein of blinkered, subtle narration. A trio of students at an exclusive school in the English countryside turn out to be clones. Their mundane, teenage interactions are set against a backdrop of muffled angst that, despite their love, their poetry and their sense of having souls, they exist only to donate their organs for medical purposes.
The book won a smattering of awards in 2003 and made Time Magazine’s list of best novels. A film version starring Keira Knightley is in the works. Yet to me, it read as though a literary author who didn’t read much science fiction suddenly discovered cloning. The delicacy and restraint of the writing, which intensified the submerged emotion of the British and Japanese narrators in previous novels, only served to obscure a rather predictable and well-trodden story with paper-doll characters. (The Guardian makes much the same point in one of its irresistable “digested reads.”) High themes and an accomplished novelist do not a great novel make.
Solaris (1972)
Solaris is, on the one hand, quite strange. On the other, it’s not strange enough.
The 1972 Soviet film by Andrei Tarkovsky follows a psychologist named Kris Kelvin to the planet of Solaris, which is covered by a vast, intelligent ocean. It’s this intelligence that responded when scientists blasted it with radioactive waves some years earlier. Solaris tapped into the dreams of scientists as they slept and sent them “visitors” that embodied their deepest desire. (No, it’s not that kind of movie.) For Kelvin, it’s his wife Hari, who had committed suicide ten years earlier when he left her. This is not a resurrection, but a creature of neutrinos that looks, feels, and loves just as Kelvin remembers. This time, Kelvin loves back.
But for the pseudo-wife, the problems have only begun. Her feelings for Kelvin may be real, but she is not a “real” human, and her existence keeps Kelvin tied to Solaris. As Hari spirals into depression and guilt, Kelvin faces the prospect of losing his wife yetagain.
Meanwhile, he and the other scientists must decide how to respond to the planet that has sent these indestructible visitors. Deliver a final, mortal blast of radiation? Give up and return to Earth? Or a new, third option: send the brain waves of Kelvin to the ocean and see what happens?
Read more…
Democracy in America: A First Look
I’m experimenting with quick, mid-reading posts.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Alexis de Tocqueville was just 26 when he and a coworker visited America to study its prison system. His quest, as it turns out, was far broader: to understand democracy in America as a case study for what he expected to happen in France and beyond.
What surprises me most about Democracy in America is its charm. Like Montaigne or Plutarch, Tocqueville wears his erudition and incisive power lightly, without dryness or pedantry.
He’s a man of faith who claims to see God’s hand in the workings of history, and democracy as a sort of manifestation of God. This idealism doesn’t get in the way of keen observation. Like Thucydides, Tocqueville assures us that his information comes “informed men” as well as primary sources, although he declines to say who.
Here the reader must necessarily rely upon my word. I could frequently have cited names which either are known to him or deserve to be so in support of my assertions; but I have carefully abstained from this practice. A stranger frequently hears important truths at the fireside, which the latter would perhaps conceal from the ear of friendship.
Such a gentleman! And if he contradicts himself, then let him contradict himself. He asks us to judge his work on its cumulative effect rather than isolated arguments. His free-flowing generalizations — and it’s almost all abstract generalization — are eminently quotable, plausible, and prophetic. Read more…
Beautiful Women, Desperately Wanting
Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina (1935)
Whatever happened to those stories of bored, beautiful women who threw themselves under trains or into the river, took arsenic or simply expired from the weight of sin? Strangled by frustrated ambition, they were, and raw emotion that couldn’t be hammered into the fine tracery of polite talk.
They were so common once. You couldn’t open a novel without meeting a Karenina, Bovary, or Vye. The House of Mirth: sleeping pills. Miss Julie: a razor. Hedda Gabler: a gun. Sexual conflict, or the rumor of it, spelled disaster.
It still astonishes me, the ferocity of their will to make men the clay of their ambitions. Read more…
