Izzy finishes Gorey’s Pomegranates; Clara Tornvall, The Autists: Women on the Spectrum; and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter, Bunter & Harriet

Gorey’s Pomegranates:  I know it’s blurry and dark, but still invite all to find all the cats you can — there are many unexpected ones

A Going Away Blog

Dear friends and readers,

As you can see, Izzy finished her puzzle, and she is thinking that she will return to one of the game stores that have filled a new place in the Springfield Mall, to find a new and third one. This is the kind of picture one feels one could do for hours, and yet feel time collapse into nothingness so absorbed can one become making this picture. In these pictures is the pleasure of re-making a wonderful picture in a new medium — see Margaret Drabble’s wonderful memoir with Jigsaws.

Drabble does relaxed research on jigsaws and we learn a lot about them and children’s games. Are they a game? I think so: you are working against the puzzle maker. You achieve something when all the pieces are in place. I do have a method: first you make the frame and then you work on different portions of the picture. Of course the puzzle maker makes this second step hard. Since the competition is at a distance, it’s relaxed and you have aesthetic pleasure putting the puzzle together.

This leads her to childhood, its history because puzzles begin as learning tools: that’s how rich and middle class children learned their geography: maps were dissected puzzles. Drabble finds the history begins in the Renaissance but spreads in the later 18th century, when childhood became something to create for a child.

A woman was a modern researcher into and collector of puzzles, Linda Hannas. Who invented them? Apparently it was a later 17th century French novelist whose main subject is education: Anne Louise Elie de Beaumont.

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As part of going off on our trip to England, I’ve been reading and rereading strong book on autism: Clara Tornall’s The Autists: women on the Spectrum.

Clara Tornvall

It’s hard to recapture or convey the experience of the book, because it treats of autism from a highly varied and often quick-moving POV, appears to move from topic to topic by association, and only gradually do you see (or invent) a structure or pattern for the part of the book one has just read and how it relates to the previous. Tornvall begins with how invisible most autistic people are unless over-pointed to, from there on, “The Invisibles,” to too much faith in mere words and categories. Early on she tackles the subject of females and says there has been little diagnosis because the criteria used come from studying men. Now she’s part of the effort to retrieve women. Her portraits of earlier or modern famous women nd gay people, she pronounces autistic (Lewis Carroll, Simone Weil, Emily Dickinson are among the literati) are useful because then she has a idiosyncratic (as we all are) concrete person to describe. She weaves her own story in — of a failed marriage (how hard they tried).

What makes it such a relief and filled with so many accurate truths is Tornvall’s lack of hypocrisy. She really shows how these gov’t agencies supposedly set up to help an autistic person get a job, let alone a good one, can do nothing but send you on a round of form filling out; she shows the frustration autistic people experience when they are confronted by the interviewer’s (professional’s) false faith in this or that nostrum. I could read it over and over; it makes me feel better because it validates my own experience and I recognize so much. The reviews of Tornvall’s book that I’ve read praise it highly but like so many reviews use general evasive words with an optimistic tone — not she.

Travel is one experience autistic people find hard to do — and it’s left-out of Tornvall’s book as also doing vacations, being a tourist. so here’s my contribution to this gap (which I put on a face-book page mentioned below for late diagnosis, self-identification autism):

I am all alone — husband dead and no friends to go with me. My daughter who lives with me will not come with me to rent a beach house or place in a hotel. I also have trouble finding places; it is an anxiety-ordeal for me to travel and I need her to come with me to navigate and do the technology. I may say staying put is what I want, But, like many other people, I like to go to interesting and beautiful places, meet old and make new friends, participate in activities other members of my “tribe” love — like reading and talking about a favorite author I’ve read so much. I like to get away to relax and the beach, admittedly in a more cool place, has its allure. Admittedly I have a hard time relaxing.

I miss my house, my books, my sense of deep security, which I need for peace of mind. I worry about this place and my cats.  I could travel with my husband because I trusted him so implicitly. I asked on a face-book page dedicated to later diagnosed, and self-identifying autistic people — so mostly older — how they feel about travel and got very similar responses to my own.https://tinyurl.com/4u42fnur

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Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter in an exaggerated dance scene

One person who was not autistic was Dorothy Sayers (read Barbara Reynolds’s delightful recreation from intimate letters and actual knowledge of one another), and I’ve been reading the best of her books this summer (Gaudy Night, Nine Tailors, Five Red Herrings), and in the late evening whiling away my time watching first the newer series with Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter (who as a couple just charmed me), and now the older one, which don’t under-rate is truly fine once you adjust yourself to the older dramaturgy. Carmichael’s is a subtler performance of a man in masks than is realized until he’s watched for real as presented differently in the different books — underneath the Bertie Wooster exterior for disguise, a hard angry Lord Peter in Murder Must Advertise; mellow and genial in Five Red Herrings, somehow interwoven into the religious sublimity and immersion in English landscape, history, church architecture and an idealization of class hierarchies that is Nine Tailors. It’s in the earlier series that the allusions and themes that hark back to Sayers’s serious literary efforts (medieval English poetry, Dante translations) are found.

Glyn Houston and Ian Carmichael as man and master, one painting, the other fishing — in the later and eariier series the servants are seen to eat the same exquisite viands as the aristocrats ….

In her introduction to Gaudy Night, Harriet Walter (a fine writer in her own right, see her Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s role for women, about her time in an all-woman cast) suggests that gradually Lord Peter became the ideal man of Sayers’s dreams, and that she married him off to her alter ego. Why is it not cloying? because they are characterized so wittily, she is so evasive and stand-offish, he so achingly in love and yet more than a little homosexual. One of the little noticed themes in the books, which does come out in the earlier series, comes from the presence of pairs of lesbians and homoerotic relationships between men (Bunter and Peter). Everything continually undercut. And at the same time, humane escape.

They are deeply pleasurable books and deeply pleasurable serial adaptations. No need to travel anywhere at all but in your imagination — you do need a DVD player because to see them properly you need the re-digitalized versions (which in the case of the older series comes with a very intelligent interview of Carmichael), and it is so much more enjoyable if you have a beautiful real book.

Ellen

I on myself must try to live

My daughter, Laura, at the National Building Museum, earlier this week

for there is no help for it. This is my 11th summer without him, the 5th since I can no longer drive at night. I can’t go far by myself — and have no stomach for it any more. It’s true that Jim having been cut off from fulfillments of older age, so am I. Tonight it rained and thundered and there is still lightning, I went out, walked round the block as in a circle, all the houses are lit, more people home than usual (it said on the news how crowded roads and airports are) or seeming so. I left my teeth off, counting on meeting no one, my shawl over my old clothes, my bedroom ballet slippers … an old woman walking alone I’ve become one of those women I used to see walking on the streets of NYC when I was young.

Dear friends and readers,

Remember my proposal to give a paper on Intriguing Women in Trollope at Somerville College, Oxford, between Sept 1-3 this year, and plan to go to London afterwards, all with Izzy, and visit the International War Museum, take in a play. Well I’ve been rereading Jane Nardin’s excellent (clearly written) He Knew She Was Right. The book is about Trollope breaking away from conventional and patriarchal views of women and in the latter part of his career depicting unconventional women sympathetically. Nardin writes is insightful in the intricacies of her arguments. This past week too I learned there is an overt homosexual man in Trollope’s oeuvre: Archie Clavering, and he is treated so obnoxiously by the other characters, and made a butt by Trollope so shamefully, it’s distressing. I have in my readings in archives come across real homosexual men in diaries and they are hidden in plain sight by their families so as to make them marriageable and safe — not boasted about but not ridiculed. Important sources for The Claverings include the 18th century iconoclastic sexually candid plays by Van Brugh, The Provok’d wife and The Provok’d Husband I’ve a chapter on this in my book, Trollope on the Net.

Well we are in a pickle (sometimes to me it’s a nightmare) and our trip to Oxford and then London in early September now uncertain. Izzy goofed on that application we sent in for her. She made it out in blue ink; we got back an email telling us she must make it out again in black ink but they did not send the old passport back or previous application. We did not think to scan in that old one with all the information so she can’t make out the new form since she doesn’t know the number of the book or its issue date. I’ve been on the phone three times and was told the congressman’s aides can do nothing until either 3 months after we first applied (April 29th) or 2 weeks before we are set to leave. People wouldn’t listen to me on the phone. I wanted advice: should we send the form without it being wholly made out and with a letter explain they have this information we don’t and either fill it out themselves or send back the old passport. No one will answer. Finally someone answered an email of Izzy’s who is in this congressman’s office (Don Beyer) and said he is now working on this and has begun the process with the agency but he can guarantee nothing. I tried to reach him on the phone but did not. I told our story to another aide emphasizing Izzy’s autism, and how nervous and tense we were that morning doing these applications. This is causing me great agony of mind.

Can you imagine what federal gov’t would be if Trump had had a 3rd term, or if he were re-elected. Nothing functioning; everything up for bribes after you “know” someone.

Finally we got some material from the state department (with a special envelope and case number) but again they do not return the old passport or application. So she filled it out as far as she could in black ink, and added a letter explaining why we don’t have the old passport book number or date issued, asking them to finish filling it out (as they do) or send all back again with needed information. All this takes time.

I did goof on the airplane too. I was unclear and now we land a day ahead. I have us to stay until September 8th, but if she cannot come with me I shall not go alone. I cannot face it. I did get my new passport and scanned it and her and my drivers’ licenses. So I may bow out of this conference which I did want to give a paper at. It is all too much for me. Loss of $4800 for the non-refundable tickets. This is the biggest haul the airlines have had from me since Jim died, and if I don’t get to go, it will be the last plane tickets I ever buy.

Each day on the Internet I read of this conference or that here and there (ISECS just now in Rome!), where people are going, and I remember how Jim and I for a couple of summers in NYC would drive on Tues/Thurs mornings at 9:30 to Jones Beach with our dog LLyr, bring coffee, croissants, a corner where dogs were allowed and stay for an hour and one half. The drive each way 40 minutes. Llyr would rush into the water and I would go in with her and play longer. Jim sat under an umbrella; he’d swim too.

There is no public beach near here closer than 3-4 hours. Here in Virginia all lakes are exclusive and membership price very high — so too do they have these in DC; I’ve learned of them since teaching at OLLI at AU.

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Hydrangeas (I’m told is the name) and ferns — one pink!

I bit the bullet and hired (for not that much less than the plane tickets) two black guys, tree people, and they came with a crew, and did a lot of work in my front yard and along the sides of the house. Among other things they injected the buses and flowers with some mighty compounds, mulched, fertilized, added ferns, but best of all I now realize they cut back the trees that overhang my property all along the right side. Asocial utterly selfish neighbors I’ve had over the years plant their trees at the edge of my property and then don’t cut them back. This is the second or third time I’ve let a group of guys cut back severely in a kind of line. What I didn’t realize was not only more sun would come in during the day, but in evening a plot that seemed to be only shady except the very earliest dawn is now in early evening. So here is the right side of my house — one half the plot they worked on; the other half is ferns and hydrangeas with the bouquets of white flowers at the end.

My teaching has gone very well this summer: people seemed really to enjoy The Heroine’s Journey with me (23 people), and a similar experience is emerging in the Gaskell Wives and Daughters class (25, though 40 registered). I am just loving her books; I’ve just re-watched the first part of Andrew Davies’s beautiful serial adaptation, for an umpteenth time. I’m rereading her Life of Bronte for the first time in decades. How powerful it is. It is made up heavily of Charlotte’s letters once she grows older; as I read of the deaths of Emily and Anne I thought of Jim’s death and how I watched over him in his agony of mind when not deeply drugged against the pain.

Thus far I’ve attended one class in person this summer. I’m told that those that are in person are again having trouble getting more than 6 to attend. I do miss the pizza parties they used to have at OLLI at AU.

After I wrote two blogs on Jane Austen sequels and Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister a distant (by space) friend sent me Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love and Jane Austen (I may have his Bookman’s Tale somewhere in the house) and will soon start it.

You see I finished the beautifully titled Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill. I have a love-hate relationship with her: I’ve loved a number of her books (not just The Woman in Black, but also In the Springtime of the Year, her Various Haunts of Men made me intensely anxious) but every time I read something she says in her own voice, I dislike her. So too here: I found myself bonding, learning from, interested in her love of certain books, why she’d reread this and not that, as a book about book reading so satisfying, but depart from this and she begin to offer her reasons for her values (not the values themselves) and I was turned off. but individual sections are worth consulting: for example, on book titles, how important, they must be appealing; how: an inner pattern, rhythms, capturing a theme or place; with a list of these (p 10), her own chapter headings exemplifying what she writes.

What else shall I say? Izzy has just risen from her early evening nap. My Clarycat is slowly getting better: she is lively all day, sits near me, trots round my chair, sits on my lap leaning against my chest while I eat; she can climb up on the desk and kitchen table once again, and jump down lightly to chair and floor. She eats a lot though so thin, drinks, uses her litter box and cleans herself though her coat is not smooth any more. She must be careful and still has problems going where she wants (her body pushes left when she wants to go right), bangs against walls. It is good I scarcely ever leave her.

Said to be Virginia Woolf’s Sappho (1947), of course it’s not — look how the birds are unafraid

How shall I end? I’ve this two weeks read a brilliantly witty, suggestive literary biography of a once famous 18th century writer, Richard Steele; it’s by Calhoun Winton (now 96): no one writes books this way in academia any more. He made me understand Steele to some extent, taught me about the milieu deeply, brought out how Steele lived, what were his finest works (the periodical essays). I ended respecting the man. All this because I’m reviewing a badly written (the jargon sentences make me blink) on captivity as everywhere in the 18th century (there’s legal as well as physical) and the author wants me to read The Conscious Lovers as about colonialism: it does have a heroine who I now realize might be a mulatto, an Indiana (played by Anne Oldfield at the time — who also played the leading roles in the Van Brugh plays I cited above). Steele owned slaves in the West Indies — from marrying as his first wife a very wealthy woman. Who knew? One source of his wealth.

A modern sexed-up conception of the 18th century play as played by 18th century actors …

Well I’m watching and re-watching Sanditon, getting to know it, getting to like it more and more and realize how in several ways what we are told about Austen’s Miss Lambe in those 12 chapters when we first meet her makes parallels to Steele’s heroine. I don’t think Andrew Davies began by reading this play, but he is probably much more steeped in 18th century literature then he gives away (he adapted Cleveland’s book, Defore’s Moll Flanders), but it’s fascinating to how some the peculiarities of Sidney’s relationship with Miss Lambe when we first meet them are analogous or similar.

The Conscious Lovers was first staged in 1722, it was the most popular play across the century, lasting well into the 1790s. In the play she is being (idealistically) kept by the hero of the play, Bevil Junior, who is having sex with her, who wants to marry her first. Maybe Austen had in mind that Sidney Parker would be involved with Miss Lambe, Sidney’s “virtue” or goodness that slowly emerges is seen in how she is boarded with a school of girls: he is protecting her reputation. The attempt to claw away her inheritance in the third season has parallels with this and other colonialist literature of the 18th century.

Solly McLeod mesmerized, Sophie Wilde eager, unsure as Tom and Sophie

Should Davies have worked the story so that the pair we were at first going to end up with were Theo James and Crystal Clarke. Imagine it …

The way Nikki Amuka-Bird was dressed as Lady Russell (Persuasion 2022) would be appropriate for Indiana

Indiana was always played by a white woman and usually the big star of the year: Anne Oldfield first played the part, but like the heroine of the recent Tom Jones, where just a few changes in Sophia’s background turned her into a mulatto, daughter of a white man and enslaved black woman. As a side comment, whether Austen ever mentioned The conscious Lovers or not, it’s improbable she didn’t know it. A number of the values underlying “true love” (respect, esteem, knowledge of the other party) are part of the discourse in CL. So there you learned something about the 18th century without having to travel to Rome.

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Oh hope very hard for Izzy and I she gets her passport back in time — or just back, we’ll settle for just back. To tell the truth I don’t know if I’m up to getting proper lodgings for Izzy and I — the way we have made a mess of what we’ve done thus far, how we’ve felt about it, shows me it’s time perhaps to concede to the realities of autism. In my Women with Autism monthly zoom I’ve now met a number of women who find travel the same ordeal I do (and Izzy at times seems to)

Last book ordered and on its way: Clara Tornvall, The Autists: How Autism is expressed in Women or Women on the Spectrum.

A generic picture that appeals to me

Ellen

Summer begins — breathing in air that makes you sick; return to Gaskell

I thought maybe this still of Hattie Morahan as Elinor enduring on during summer might be appropriate (Sense and Sensibility, 2009, scripted Andrew Davies)

Dear friends and readers,

Summer has begun because my teaching has begun, and if I’m not mistaken, my first class at OLLI at AU for 4 weeks on The Heroine’s Journey has thus far gone very well. I’ve written my first letter to my coming class (less than 2 weeks) at OLLI at Mason, on what editions of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters to get, two exquisitely good readings aloud of an unabridged text (Patricia Tomlinson, Nadia May) and the wondrous movie, and I was delighted two people on Trollope&Peers appear to be planning to read along! I have incontrovertible proof that last summer’s dismal numbers were due to people still in large numbers refusing to come in person, for I now have 30 people in The Heroine’s Journey (the texts to some as obscure as the texts for last summer); and an astounding 40 for Gaskell whose book, Wives & Daughters, cannot compete in known-ness, surface excitement and media triumphs (a couple of musicals, 3 film adaptations) of last summer’s Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White. Last summer I had 6-8 people at OLLI at AU which went down to 4 and then 2; 6 people at OLLI at Mason which went up to 13 registered 9-10 attending.

I am myself literally lonely — physically at home — though amidst kind and generous friends on the Internet so I’m doing things remotely for a fourth summer — virtual festivals (Hays, Yorkshire), virtual conferences (Elizabeth Gaskell). I read over half the office space for office workers that was once needed is now going unrented. Had this been the case the summer after Jim died, I would have been devastated — I built a sort of life before the pandemic which the present one is a morphed version of.

Maybe it’s for the best — because not only are there now daily massacres and killings (sometimes I fear some neighbor will shoot at me as I take my daily afternoon walk — or, worse, Izzy), but I became very sick two days ago and am still not over having had my body filled with deeply unhealthy air. Thousands of fires burning across Canada, sent smoke-filled air south as far as South Caroline, west too, and DC/Maryland/Virginia had the worst pollution ever experienced on record.

It’s no joke. The smoky burnt air is real, with little bits of stuff in it, and I have been having a major sinus attack/hay fever. I find wearing the KN95 mask in the house helps, a spray helps a tiny bit, the over-the-counter histamine, Claritin-D — I’ve taken 4 since yesterday afternoon. I’m filled with itchy liquid, my chest, face, nose pouring out, throat parched. My ears popped and were hot. I took a sleeping pill to sleep.  The air and I have improved over today but I am still not well, still parched and blowing my nose and coughing hard.

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I’ve made a good start overall for all my summer projects: I’m working on two reviews for publication, and have finished a third. I’ve finished reading Wives & Daughters silently to myself, and I loved it, and now am listening in my car (when I get a chance) to Patricia Tomlinson reading it aloud just magnificently. W&D is Tolstoyan, strongly feminist, a wondrous literary masterpiece. I accompanied it with Jenny Uglow’s equally moving brilliant book on Gaskell, reading her books closely sensitively imaginatively, A Habit of Stories, am onto criticism. Evenings I reveled in Cranford and the Return to Cranford and all of Sandy Welch’s North and South. So you might say I’m about ready to make that syllabus (Sunday) and send it to the class, to begin June 21st. I found both movies closely related, rooted in Gaskell’s life, dreams, strong ideas about gender identities transformed; my favorite character-actress still Anna Maxwell Martin as Bessie Higgins, with scenes of strong friendship with Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and her father, Nicolas Higgins (Brenden Coyle)

Also reread Maria Tartar’s Heroine with 1001 Faces. I was so newly impressed by Tartar’s achievement I thought I’d share any reviews: they are all inadequate and (ironically) re-emphasize masculinist values — the book is also about another emphasis, re-nuanced values and norms. But I have found Tartar on video discussing her book. Is there anything not on video nowadays – yesterday I listened to Mary Beard on women and power and the effect of the continuation of pernicious classical tropes on our society today —

You see I am staying in mostly — for a fourth summer.

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I have met a couple of friends for time in museums — the National Gallery three times, with its Phillip Guston rooms and rooms; I admit I like his earlier more realistic art much better than the abstract expressionism, but the film where he talked of how he moved from one type of art to another (excuse the immodesty) reminded me of how I feel about my work, how I’ve developed a blog art, moved from studying one century to another, from the UK to Italy seriously, to post-colonialism in English books set in and about India (the Raj and its aftermath. This is only one small part of it, and not the most interesting (that was the inward man):

One afternoon a kindly friend, Adele, came over — from OLLI at Mason, an Englishwoman just my age, living in Reston. A rare treat for me. I made us a lovely lunch — if I do say myself. It required no cooking beyond emptying a jar of delicious homemade soup (feels like that) from Trader Joe’s, making a very plain salad & salad dressing, buying two kind of delicious traditional cheeses and bread. Then we watched the first episode of 4 of the 1999 Wives & Daughters on my DVD player attached to my computer (plays Region 2 DVDs). I was so cheered when both my cats joined us! even Ian who usually runs away, and poor Clarycat on my lap. It was all too short an afternoon — the best kind …

She will be in my class; it was educational for me to listen to how she reads the book and what she saw in the movie.

Not all goes that well at all. One afternoon was so fraught with tension (me masking myself, her irritated at me, tired of me I expect). After a few hours out with her, I was that exhausted and nerve-wracked that I became confused and stepped out into traffic! luckily I pulled myself back quickly enough. I just had felt bewildered by the stress. I held onto myself (so to speak) on the Metro ride and then driving myself back to my house when I opened up a small bottle of prosecco. It helped. But I needed a nap and for the rest of the evening and night could not do anything constructive. I am wondering what do others do to recover from social experiences? We are all probably having more of then now since we are said to be post-pandemic.

I should remember this kind of thing is as common with me as I listen to various people in my neighborhood having their summer parties on their very fancy lawns behind their super-expensive mansions. People’s laughter floating in the air. My tenth summer without my beloved, Jim.

Donal McCann as young Phineas Finn speaking to no purpose in Parliament (Pallisers, 1974)

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Have I covered everything that mattered over the last couple of weeks and weeks to come? My talk on Phineas Finn, “Words for Sale: Chapters 13-26,” went well, and here is where Dominic has put up the video and transcript and soon I will make a new blog for Trollope and Phineas — and Ralph the Heir, where I will discuss politics in Trollope.

Phineas Finn ~ Chapters 14-26

I’ve registered Izzy and I for Somerville College, Oxford, for September 1-2, for the conference we are to go to and this Sunday Laura will be over and we’ll rent a hotel in London for 4 days and book a plane! I reveled watching and re-watching and then blogging on the three Tom Jones movies.

My beloved pussycats grow closer and closer to me; Clarycat asserts herself in new ways; she sits against my chest as I eat breakfast and lunch. He is on my wave length a lot.

I attended another Poetry Reading Group online (a club) at OLLI at Mason, and my chosen poem was Elizabeth Bishop‘s One Art. It stood out among the choices as the deepest, most vivid, clearest, many-layered poem of grief and endurance:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Have I mastered the art of losing yet? Get used to it, she says. The villanelle form just a bit distorted captures the manic feel of the genre. Over and over disaster, master. It seems to take a long time.

What I miss most each summer is a nearby beach. There is none her in N.Va; there are only close-by lakes which are taken over by exclusive clubs; niches in the Potomac taken over by the super-rich of Northwest Washington (private parks). For all too short a time, Jim and I, taking our dog Llyr, would summers driven to Jones Beach on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The drive took 40 minutes; we’d arrive around 10 and stay until 11:30, with coffee and coissants. How the dog would romp in the water. No photos, just memories. I must remember he does not exist any more except in my mind and in the minds of those who remember him (Laura and Izzy), with the house around me and much that is in it gathered by us, which I keep up. (How relieved I was when Biden outwitted those horrific people over their manufactured crisis of a debt ceiling — they would have stopped all the money Izzy and I have coming in). If there was such a beach, I would get Izzy to come with me once a week, mornings, the two of us, with books … NYC public beaches everywhere, easy to get to. NYC is one of the cities I’ve lost, Leeds the other.

From the 1930s, Ken Howard, Beach Life

Ellen

We are 76: diary entries for 3 days and nights; the brilliant wit of Magpie Murders … Songs by Sondheim, art by Sargent

Flowers from supermarket and snacks & drink for the week from earlier this autumn

Why we? I counted 5 friends and acquaintances who told me they are become 76 this year too

Dear friends and readers,

I turned 76 on November 29th.  I’m using the occasion to express and reflect on this transitional state which I feel I’m in but don’t understand that well. I’m not sure what’s changing in me and time continues to separate me from what I was when Jim first died. Julian Barnes calls the time after a beloved person has died, their deathtime in one’s memory. It’s being brought on partly or even largely by my (and most other faculty, whether remunerated or volunteer-retired) inability to bring back enough people into the classrooms in person so as not to have to worry, that this day I may arrive at an empty or nearly empty classroom. For older people the partial cause is Covid is still attacking and killing off older people in visible numbers. So I am looking forward to teaching and taking courses online almost wholly until March, and after March (spring term) mostly online, perhaps until next fall (2023) or the following spring (2024). Maybe looking forward is not the phrase I want.

I’m going to try for a routine myself. By 8:30 this morning I’ll be exercising for half an hour, and sometime mid-day I’ll try for a 20-30 minute walk. Again, I’ll be in a great deal, and most of what I’ll do will be online so I must try to keep myself busy, communicate with people online cordially and exercise. Sleep I can’t force: last night I slept but 4 hours, but when I got up I read Magpie Murders, the novel by Anthony Horowitz. Yes I got the book. It’s a delightful parody of your typical Booker Prize books among other things — I’ll write about the book separately (see below for serial). Come near Xmas I’ll watch the Biederbecke TV series and others I can find that cheer me.

I’ve had a repeat of the experience I’ve often described here: another woman I’d become friends with and visited, visited me, or I went out with (though not since summer 2021) was breaking appointments to the point I finally wrote to her about it in such a way that I knew she’d either fall silent altogether or try to mend the relationship. So now she has silently opted for Choice 1 — the internet slang might be she’ll ghost me again (previous times she has pretended she didn’t get the email, or her phone was out of order just at the time I phoned her). She would never tell me openly how she felt; if at some point she wanted to break it, she never told me or why.

Joanna Trollope in Next of Kin has given me second thoughts: “It was simply that he couldn’t go on loving someone who kept sucking him down into the bog of her own personality problems — or at least, he could love her but he couldn’t live with her [I am thinking of myself as this guilty preying person but don’t think I did that this time, but I probably did in previous relationships] … He didn’t want to emphasize the effect of her defeatism on him, or indeed any other of her deficiencies but he wanted to make her think [again it’s me who am defeatist but one would then have to talk to me to bring this out more] ‘I don’t want never to see you again,’ he planned to say, ‘I just can’t see you for a bit. Not until you’ve got something to give me back'” [so what is it that I should be offering other people back?]

I saw this magnificent painting at the National Gallery this past Wednesday with Betty at the National Gallery — an exhibit of John Singer Sargent’s painting while he was in Spain. He copied several famous painter’s paintings and then produced the long-pent-up depictions of ordinary people in all their depths. The good there is inedible and Betty becomes quickly impatient at these exhibitions but I did see some art worth the gazing

It’s not just external things — I find I am not eager to go anywhere — it was Betty’s idea to go and we had made the appt a while back. I admit I was the one to back out of the second I was to go to (the Phillips Collection) with her this Saturday. But she wrote back very quickly, relieved herself. How relieved I was. I do worry so I won’t get back before dark – darkness arrives not far from 5 pm. “Hello darkness my old friend. What are you doing here at 5 pm!”

Now I wrote about this last time so will not repeat again the terms of or feelings I’m having as I struggle to understand this new phase of widowhood, and spend my time enjoyably and productively (for me this means new learning, new books, discovery of new authors, new topics and writing projects), and cheerfully online with others. Since I last wrote, I’ve gone deeper into Joanna Trollope (read two more books, listening to a third), and started both my women’s and Italian studies for winter and next spring. It’s hard to make a plan and follow it. Tomorrow I will disrupt my new pattern to attend a few of the Renaissance Society of America’s sessions for their yearly AGM (going on virtually these few days). A big help is I do love all the books I’m reading and find the topics I follow of intense interest. As usual I like particularly the secondary (critical and biographical) books.

But my body tires so I cannot exercise or walk was much, and I grow sadder as the day moves into night. This was exacerbated this past week by the insistent holiday statements I see everywhere on the Net and hear too among the occasional acquaintances I meet. I’m told to be very happy and loving amid my family and friends. I can see that my quiet relatively alone state is not uncommon because enough people describe what they are doing truthfully on the corners of FB, twitter and listservs I inhabit. Nonetheless, getting through Thanksgiving and my birthday became a sort of work project where I enlisted acquaintances and friends by posting about how I (we, for Izzy was with me) got through.

An Egyptian goose — each morning when I arrive at twitter — sometimes around 8 am or so — someone I follow who follows me has put on photographs of mid-England parks and birds near where she lives

So here’s what I posted onto FB later last Thursday afternoon (a short version appeared on twitter):

Izzy and I walked across Old Town this afternoon — balmy sunny weather. We used to do this each year after Jim died and before the pandemic. The tree is the Alexandria City tree in the Town Square and the lights are on — though you cannot see them. My strength did give out towards the end. That was 4 years ago and I was reminded of how I felt when we “did” Toronto with our two kind but much younger [than me] friends this past August, but home now. Another half hour we’ll put on a roast chicken for two. We could have gone out to a bought dinner, but I’m glad we have chosen this. From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last …

We won’t have champagne, orange juice for her and Merlot for me must do us. Now I’ll return to Margaret Atwood’s sardonically funny (funny is not quite the word I want) Penelopiad. I hope all who read this message are having a good day and evening.

Then last this Sunday evening on FB (nutshell on twitter):

Promotional photo of Ada’s on the River looking outward from inside the place at the Potomac

My 76th birthday is in 2 days and so my daughter, Laura, and her husband, Rob, came around 6 to take us out to a new restaurant in a new area of Old Towne, Alexandria: Ada’s on the River. The dinner was delicious and the desert too. I had my first whiskey and ginger ale (two of them) for a very long time. I don’t keep hard liquor in the house lest I drink too much. I liked the walk back afterwards along the Potomac from boardwalk to boardwalk. It’s very rare I am out at night nowadays.

There are still several areas around the Potomac, just near the river, which have been relatively desolate — they were very much so when Jim & I first moved to Alexandria. This is a southern city, originally blighted by slavery for the majority of people, then gross inequality and severe racism and classism structured into all the institutions and gov’t of the area, and while after WW2 and middle 1960s, when conditions began to improve the growth of certain areas has been slow and uncertain — Carter had made a good start with new housing, but Reagan destroyed that. Very expensive housing developments along the edge of this town here and there in the 1990s, some on the river . Recently then — last 20 years all along the river for the first time building up the boardwalks, the places for sailing, areas of recreational fun — so new restaurants and bars.

I shall have to find my own travel plan this summer — next week I’ll call Road Scholar and if the Irish registration is still there, I’ll go with them. I’ll try to do the global retry and pre-TSA stuff at the airport in the spring. There is now a silver line Metro going to Dulles that stops at King Street Station; Izzy has said she will come with me to help me through the machines going out.

In the meantime we four planned for a Christmas time together, a movie (an Agatha Christie type), a dinner at home (cooked by Rob, who’s become quite a cook) and exchange of presents.

What I didn’t tell anyone on FB or twitter was after an hour or so when I’d got home and was watching Magpie Murders (on which see below) I began to cry and cry and cry. I could feel Laura’s reluctance to be there when they first arrived, and know we won’t see them again after Christmas for a long while. It was Rob who walked beside me there and back.

For my birthday itself I took it easy, read favorite books, had yummy soup for lunch, and put this on FB (nutsell on twitter)

I am 76! In my now enclosed porch or sunroom where live my movie (dvds) collection, notebooks, films scripts, companions … all around me my little radio, ipad, pussycat bed by window … I am torn between sending a link to Sondheim’s “I’m still here ….” (as belted out by Elaine Stritch) or Old friends (done by a variety of male singers): favorite line: “What’s to discuss? …”

Izzy took the photo with her cell phone

This is to thank the many people sending me cards, pictures, good wishes, wise sayings … I can’t seem to reach every one to thank each person individually but know that I do thank you and you are helping me to pass a cheerful good day ….

About an hour or so later I listened to and watched Elaine Stritch on YouTube: when I watched I thought of my 27 years as an adjunct lecturer, and remember the line from Elaine Showalter quoted about a heroine in one of Jean Rhys’s novels who stands for all women: Still one man away from welfare ….

Over the long day and evening and next morning I really did get many cheering messages, a lot of them individualized, a few teases, but kindly meant I felt. Two cards, one from my aging aunt, another from a long time old Internet British friend, met three times in Oxford; my cousin, Pat had phoned me too

Then very late in the evening: from Merrily We Roll Along (Jim thought this probably Sondheim’s deepest truest musical) “Old Friends:” now I had to admit I have damn few old friends (or they live far away, a few old acquaintances. This was after the final episode of Magpie Murders

We are coming to the end of the year, its ripe death (as people might say), so I’ll end on citing just one book I feel I drew most joy and learning from across the whole year: Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows, especially when she talked of her writing, art, and the imagination. A new author answering the needs of my heart in a new healthy way, teaching me to see and to help myself, Joanna Trollope (not a comfort read at all after all).

And as with two years ago with David Nicholls’ Us (book and film), I have truly got a great kick out of Magpie Murders, a murder mystery serial in the Agatha Christie tradition, scripted and produced by the inimitable Anthony Horowitz (I am still re-watching Foyle’s War)

Atticus Pund explaining where they are going to Sue Rylands

It’s self-reflexive: it’s Anthony Horowitz meditating the life and work of a mystery writer, a hack out of the Agatha Christie tradition — only Horowitz knows he is no mere hack and has gone beyond the originating subgenre. We have two different levels of story: in one we are with the writer, Alan Conway, his editor, Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville), the head of the publishing company, Conway’s cynical homosexual ex-lover and his embittered sister, Claire; in the other the characters in Conway’s book most of whom correspond to counterpart characters in the series’ real life, often ironically — except for the detective, Atticus Pund (Tim McMullan, originally Timothy Spall was dreamed of) and the editor, Sue Rylands. The same actor will plays at least 2 roles — one person appears in three (if I’m not mistaken). We also see these characters when they are playing characters who existed decades ago and when they are playing contemporary characters (a downright common trope nowadays is a jump in time but rarely this cleverly done and usually with two different look-alike actors).

It’s not too mechanical, too much artifice of this type would cloy. So beyond Atticus Pund and Sue Rylands, Sue’s sister, Katie (Claire Rushbrook) and Sue’s lover, Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis), a teacher of Greek who would like to go live in Crete with Sue, have no counterparts in the 1950s story in the book. The two murderers are played by different actors, they look and are different, though they do the deed in similar fashion. The murderer’s black girlfriend in the 1950s story in the book has no counterpart in the contemporary life story. You might have expected this to be the other way round, but no. In both narratives, the same black actor plays the Anglican vicar.

What’s fascinating is how we move from book (takes place 1950s) back to life (takes place 2022). The camera is following the 1950s characters and car in the book down the road, we reach a bend and turn and now we are with the 2022 characters in life. One moves back and forth starting with the third episode, Atticus Pund; but he is noticed by no one but Sue Rylands, who at first regards him as simply an individual figment of her imagination, but by the end treats him as a person like herself and enters the world of the book to discover how the book ends. The tone throughout is warm and witty

I am now taught how this kind of material — murders growing out of deep bitterness, jealousy, selfishness, sociopathic impulses — a dog is even poisoned — can become absorbing and curiously comforting matter — as in Foyle’s War we have good guys and they win through, with a justice of sorts achieved

So that’s all for tonight as I move into winter. Better to be alive than not (as Elaine Stritch reminds us)

John Singer Sargent: Snow — I wonder if we’ll see any this winter in Alexandria?

Ellen

Widowhood: I seem to be going through another transition

Woods and Streams in Delaware, [early] Winter, 1916 (Edward W. Redfield)

“Alas, with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing” (Austen, Persuasion Chapter 7)

Dear friends and readers,

I seem to be going through yet another transition in this seeming both long and short widowhood. I’ve stopped going out as much as I once did. Of course part of the cause of this is that I can no longer drive once the sky reaches dusk, but I could go out more during the day, and I could have recourse to Uber/Lyft
and ordering cabs ahead. I don’t. Part of this the effect of self-quarantining taken well past what I understand most or many others have done. It is so peaceful; I am no longer used to enduring the agonies, anxiety as I begin to realize I am lost and panic when I find I am not at all where I meant to be. Waze recently updated itself and now it is of no use to me at all. I can’t get past “save this destination” to “go now.” I’m telling myself I shall be reading more, and I think there’s evidence that I am already.

This is a matter of telling myself what I’m not quite following. I’m telling myself I’m giving over trying to write longer books and volunteering for talks and short projects. I’m not quite following this as I volunteered to give another talk to the Every-other-week online London Trollope Society group on (as I’m calling it) Anthony Trollope’s American Civil War Christmas Stories: “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” As a result of doing a talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for an OLLI at AU class, I’ve thought of a course for spring 2024 that might actually attract enough people to dare to do it in public: I’d call it “Everybody’s Protest Novel” after James Baldwin’s famous scathing essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son. And I’d do:

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Louisa May Alcock, “Contraband;” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Joan Didion, Play it like it Lays and El Salvador by Joan Didion, and James Baldwin’s short non-fiction story, “Stranger in a Village” and novel, If Beale Street could talk …

But this will be the last; after this I will stick with the new terrains I’ve carved out: Italian literature, Anglo-Indian memoirs and novels (British style fiction set in India is the longer phrase) and women writer courses. And 19th century masterpiece courses, mostly by Trollope as central and framing presence.

This means I will be alone more, and am teaching myself to accept being alone and this great loneliness since Jim died. I am tired of trying uselessly for what cannot be and what I am not sure I’d at all like. Go out with friends who ask me, but don’t chase, don’t be the one to suggest unless it is really a museum show, a play, a musical or concert you want to go to.

I do not mean to deny what joy or happiness I can feel when I’ve been out with others, spent good time with others. I knew such exhilaration and contentment when the class I had been teaching these past 9 weeks ended today.

One person had suggested we start at 1:15 to give us ourselves full time to cover all we wanted and watch film clips from the early 1990s BBC The Rector’s Wife, and the 1983 Barchester Chronicles. Eight of the nine people who have been coming steadily agreed and what a splendid class it was. I know they were enjoying it and so was I. It is so much better in person when there is a full enough class.

Yet I will not do it again until Spring 2024 since it is such a difficult thing to build a class of people coming regularly nowadays that I lose perspective, fret over how few may show up (an inappropriate response to an adult education or playful college class).

Can you understand this, gentle reader? Some new phase of calm is what I am feeling come over me, or wanting calm at long last. I discovered I lost weight when I went to Dr Wiltz a couple of weeks ago with a list of pains and complaints that he duly checked over, to tell me I am fine, just getting older yet. I’ve kept to my vow not to add sugar to anything and so I eat less.

18th century lady’s shoes

Every Friday until I run out I’m putting foremother poet blogs on Wompo — the only one. No one can bother post anything which is not about building their career. Last week it was Mary Jones, an 18t century chantress (as Johnson called her) who wrote these beautiful verses upon the death of her beloved friend, Miss Clayton; they are to her memory

Still, but for Thee, regardless might I stray,
Where gentle Charwell rolls her silent tide;
And wear at ease my span of life away,
As I was wont, when thou were at my side.

But now no more the limpid streams delight,
No more at ease unheeding do I stray;
Pleasure and Thou are vanish’d from my sight,
And life, a span! too slowly hastes away.

Yet if thy friendship lives beyond the dust,
Where all things else in peace and silence lie,
I’ll seek Thee there, among the Good and Just.
‘Mong those who living wisely — learnt to die.

And if some friend, when I’m no more, should strive
To future times my mem’ry to extend,
Let this inscription on my tomb survive,
‘Here rest the ashes of a faithful friend.’

A little while and lo! I lay me down,
To land in silence on that peaceful shore,
Where never billows beat, or tyrants frown,
Where we shall meet again, to part no more.”

Change a name and a pronoun and this connects to the way I feel about Jim, though I know I shall never meet him again, since literally he no longer exists, nor will I when I die.

This is what I have to report. This is what I have to come in the next two months. Lunch out with my friend, Alison tomorrow, two museum shows with Betty and one play (MAAN) and one musical (Into the Woods) with Betty in December. Lunch with Eleanor sometime in December: Zorba the Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle. One in person DC Trollope reading group meeting this Sunday — just outside Bethesda (Nina Balatka), and lunch with OLLI at AU SGLs one day in December. Laura and Rob with Izzy will take me out to dinner on Nov 27th as two days before my birthday. Christmas we’ll go with Rob and Laura to a good movie, and then back to their house for dinner at home and exchange of presents. I’ll tell you about these as they happen.

Now I’m evolving a reading plan for myself and I’ve begun with Italian studies (first up Grazia Deledda’s Cosima), Heroine’s books (Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s Women and Economics and Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction), back to, beginning again Valerie Martin’s marvelous The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (a ghost story!). Then as I please beloved individual authors as I feel them (Joanna Trollope a new source of comfort and strenght, Next of Kin) and literary history (Joan Hedrick’s biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe).

Leslie Manville as Sue Ryelands (she’s also in Sherwood, The Crown, was Mrs ‘arris who went to Paris)

Evenings wonderful serials — I am actually enjoying Magpie Murders on PBS, which I’ll blog about with BritBox’s Sherwood and Karen Pirie (Val McDermid’s Distant Echo, set in modern Scotland. The year of Leslie Manville! Last blogs have been on Outlander 6 (1-4 & 5-8), seasons of processing grief, time of trauma; and upon the coming retirement of Judy Woodruff.

How much this house means to me I cannot express strongly enough. My refuge, my memories (Jim all around me), my beloved cats. I vow (like poor Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, I’ve just finished) to remain more cheerful, open to others partly by drawing boundaries.

Here is the red berry bush on one side of my house: finally it bloomed and turned out to be the sort of bush I associate with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and beautiful middle English poetry

Late autumn, beginning my tenth year without Jim,

Ellen

October’s end: Samhain (SAH-win), and remembering when we played in Love’s Last Shift

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

The hard beginning of October has been long over, and we’ve had a couple of beautiful weeks: fall used to be my favorite time of year. I still love the light cool breezes, the whitish color of blue light in the morning and orangey-beige at dusk, the variegated colors of the leaves and trees and bushes, so that when I look out my window and see a receding block going downwards on both sides and in the far distance criss-crossing the street and sky yet more soft melting variety of intermingled trees. It reminds me why I quite like being alive. And I’ve put up a cheering picture: Witchy Art by Margaryta Yermolayeva.

Late last week we had frightening news: Rob, Laura’s husband, has developed a second form of cancer. From last time we knew he has a gene that makes him susceptible to cancer, and that is why he has tests twice a year; it’s been over 9 years since the last. Then Laura said it was skin (Squamous) cancer. No time was wasted and today he had an all-day operation. The cancer was in his face, and it was cut out; they then follow trails of cancer cells; when these gave out, there was said to be no cancer left, and they proceeded to do skin grafts on his face, then a face-lift, and at the close stitches by his nose and moustache. 8 hours. This is called mohs surgery, and has an excellent cure rate. Laura appears to have been in the hospital near him (with laptop to do her work) throughout and brought him home tonight. It seems no radiation will be necessary, but he goes for tests November 9th to make sure. You will appreciate how worrying this has been.

My osteoporosis is not as bad as the doctor feared, and “all” I have to do is take a prescription pill once a week, early morning, drink lots of water for 2 hours while sitting up. I too will have tests, but in 6 months time.

Two of the courses I’m taking (at Politics and Prose bookshop zoom space, on James Baldwin’s writing, on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda) have come to an end — I’m still reading the latter with a group of friends on FB, and one day spontaneously wrote a defense of Walter Scott’s art (he is so influential on the depiction of the Jewish characters). I was asked to give a brief or short talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stunning book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a “The Coming of the Civil War” course at OLLI at AU. It went over very well and now I’ve turned the talk into a brief essay blog explaining why it hit such an emotional nerve at the time and why it continues to elicit strong responses from readers, and I put my paper “Jane Austen and Anne Finch’s work in Manuscript and 21st century Manuscript Culture” on academia.edu and then linked it to an explanatory blog after I found I was not able to go to the EC/ASECS gathering after all. I regretted not being able to to the 40th anniversary party of OLLI at AU yesterday: again it was held into the time range when I’d have to be driving home at dusk into the dark. This is a serious disability now, for it cuts down on the small amount of real or physical social life I have. I am enjoying all the zoom classes I go to and one I teach, but know I am at the same time sadly lonely.  On Twitter.

Sometimes it seems I have such a long time ahead of me without him in the world. It’s been such a long time already. I’ve learned I can survive as long as I have my adequate income, and Izzy with me helps enormously, but still so many years perhaps to go without him.

So to tell you what has gone on with me outwardly (and inwardly), I look at what are in effect diary entries on face-book (short form entries on twitter), and can that I enjoyed for the first time two great movies: Tony Richardson’s 1960s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), a new superb serials (I joined Britbox!), e.g., 2022 Sherwood, an insightful serial dramatization of miners in Britain in 1984 and then 20 years later, how Thatcher succeeded in dividing and crushing them politically and personally and now they are bitter at one another and the larger society which has left them to rot — it’s on the long memories of life

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

Loneliness stands out as more than a brilliant film artfully, with cast famously a young Tim Courtney but also James Bolan (of Beiderbecke’s Tapes), Michael Redgrave, someone called Topsy Jane (!). I had an instinct that at the end our hero would not win the long run for the prison warden even though conventional mores would dictate this as a triumph. No, he would not be used, no matter what it cost him – partly because he knew winning would get him nothing despite vague promises. The intense depiction of poverty and class in Britain at the time; the music for Jerusalem, and the interlude of joy in sexual love at a beach — all make it fit into Angry Young Men material but also these British Social Conscience films of the 1960s. I can’t recommend this one too highly. Tony Richardson the famous director, but Alan Sillitoe wrote the story where the male lead is not a young sweet adolescent but a somewhat anti-social criminal type, and screenplay. Like Sherwood, it takes place in Nottingham; like Sherwood an ironic use of the Blake song Jerusalem.  I’ll mention Jim went to a public school where he had to play a sport, and he choose long-distance running — it does allow you solitude — escape for the time running.

The Red Bull Theater has returned to online productions (and in person at the same time: they did a dramatic reading of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, a witty, hard but good-natured too intelligent sequel, as it were correcting the prurient hypocritical and sentimental Love’s Last Shift by Colley Cibber, reminding me of how when Jim was 24 and I 26 we played a pair of amoral servants, he the gambling male and me the promiscuous female in just that inferior play (a great hit in the later 1690s). Here we are, 1972-73, at the Graduate Center, and I daresay it was the fall of that year:

Decades ago, when we were children — how wrinkle free is his skin, how unknowing is that smile only I know from memory. I had experienced it all right, but had no idea the complex causes, of what politics really is.  This past Monday night I sat with my copy of Vanbrugh’s play and read along. The video had a running transcript at the bottom, I could pause and re-watch, I was close up to their faces and bodies, could hear every word.

I learned that non-human animals can get very sick and die from Covid-19 too. This essay explains which animals are likeliest to get sick, the statistics on this, and which likeliest to transmit the disease to whom and get it from whom, that the supreme court might just act to protect pigs (at long last) from a short caged life. How angry I felt when the Washington Post had an editorial against allowing pigs a little enjoyable life lest it put the price of pork chops up, and someone somewhere lose a profit.

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

I have added the New Statesmen to my budget of subscriptions, which I hardly keep up with, but it comes in driblets each morning and so I do read it; Jim and I let our subscription lapse when we moved to Virginia as too expensive for us at that time. I am still buying books, doing things remembering that he would have appreciated this, understood that. I really felt an intense detestation of the thug woman, Liz Truss, a Thatcher without brains, enough to make me want to abjure feminism. Luckily I came across over the day Truss was still not giving in, Amia Srinivasan’s review of Andrea Dworkin’s My Name is Andrea in the LRB where both recognize the core of the subjection of woman, is male determination to control woman’s sexuality (be in charge of at least one if not more women), so felt yes, it has been of some use.

I have probably told you my winter offering, The Heroine’s Journey (a 4 week online course with 4 slender books, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other adult tales, Ferrante’s Lost Daughter, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey), and my spring one Contemporary Italian Memoirs and Novels (an 8 week onliner, three Levi’s, Natalia’s Family Lexicon, Carlo’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Primo’s Periodic Table, and Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend) are accepted a OLLI at Mason so I will be useful for the coming year and have much to do and to enjoy. Cross fingers the second will be accepted at for the spring 10 week online course and the first for the summer 4 week online course at OLLI at AU. I am still hoping to travel with Laura and Izzy in the later spring and July — to Leeds for a Eurovision extravaganza where I don’t have to go to this event, and to San Diego comic.con where again I need not go, but stay at a beach-house. Dreams?

OTOH, my greatest fear is I’ll lose this house (and then everything in it I value). That is partly another reason why I am thinking of curtailing all travel — and won’t go unless I truly feel I’ll have a good time and won’t know the ordeal of anguish I often do for a reward not worth it every time. I sometimes think I would kill myself if I lost this peaceful refuge.

So I conclude this diary entry: Wompo has started up Foremother Postings again, and again it is slackening off, but they have made me remember one of my foremother poets, Amy Lowell and two of her poems intense moods that speak to me:

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak-tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and
rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the
nbsp; Canterbury bells.

[I do work all day and late at night I do feel so desperately tired and look about me for someone, something, a book, feel the silence, long for music — and then I watch The Crown, or Outlander, or Foyle’s war where I find depths of feeling in characters to fill the emptiness of Jim’s having been devoured]

The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

[And why should I ever go away from my memories of him, ravage myself on those knives however hidden]

Ellen about to watch the last episode of the third season of The Crown, where the two sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret confront one another after Margaret’s feeble attempt at suicide, and say they could not live without the other’s support, and must carry on both for the sake of the other …

Izzy, five years ago, at a library conference, with the patron saint of libraries, Benjamin Franklin

Old-fashioned diary entry

This is a place in Central Park, NYC, I know well: ancient rocks. I used to sit there. (Izzy put it on twitter from her trip to NYC these 6 days)

Today nine years ago Jim died. The comfort of my existence went, my friend stopped existing literally. I have learned much about people since he is gone. A fourth wall in the house I imagined myself in fell away. I have had to interact and wanted to interact and in some ways have become a better person. I learn a lot by being with kinds of people I never came into contact with all that much, some of whom know a lot more than me on this or that subject. But I’d rather have been happy with him.

Here is the obituary I wrote the morning after he died

To mark this day here’s a diary entry (from a letter I write to a friend daily — usually early morning)

A glade in the Sheep Meadow

Now every Sunday I take one of these fosamax (brand name) pills for the osteoporosis.  I am then supposed to sit or stand up for 2 hours and drink 6-8 oz of water. After which I can eat my breakfast or do whatever I do normally. It’s awkward but this is what the doctor ordered.  The tests this past week showed that I don’t need injections or other supplements than the Caltrate-D and folic acid pill I already take daily. Dr Wiltz said that in another year I’d have the same tests and see where we are.

Izzy happened upon the zoo in Central Park:  she is looking down at a Bear going for a walk

I still get those pains in my chest — and now they come unexpectedly at any time of the day. I don’t take the pills for them (2 different bottles) most of the time because the pain is like a sore pain, and most of the time goes away quickly.   The pills are super strong

This is Izzy’s view from the new Whitney museum — I’ve never been there; it happened after Jim died and the one visit I took to the city since I suffered so trying to go places, including the park, the theater, I had a small heart attack when I got home. So I won’t go again unless I go with a friend. It’s too much for me.

I love to talk about books and love to read or to listen to others talk about them.  It does not at all get in the way of my enjoyment; it enrichens it  I don’t worry that this prejudices me or anyone else: it is probably the basis of English literature study. I have no understanding of spoiler warnings.   Only if it’s a mystery and at the end I am truly supposed to be surprised do I not like to be told what is going to happen  In fact often I’ll read the wikipedia article or something else to see if I want to read it; or if it’s an upsetting tragic or melodrama in some way book that affects me, I like to read what’s coming so as not to suffer too much anxiety.  Those that are too strong, I don’t read — Outlander has a lot of bad things that happen but our hero, heroine and other beloved characters usually win out or are happy for some other reason by the end.

For me to write a long piece I’d have to give up blogging. The trouble here is that I love (I admit) the gratification of readership and people saying they enjoyed what I wrote. I’ve now written about8 or 9 books, and produced editions of 5.  Of these 2 have been published as regular books, and 1 as an edition.  Most of the rest are on my website.  High scholarship, the translations, and some others have a readership but it took a long time for me to accomplish these.  It required really taking myself out of circulation.  I didn’t mind as long as I had Jim. But take these 5 days (Izzy away in NYC) I am alone and lonely but for my company on the Net. So that’s why I say when I can no longer go out and teach I’ll write these longer books again.  It is hard to be autistic, to be snubbed, not to be able to interact with others intuitively, to say things others find embarrassing or unacceptable for reasons I can’t understand. I’ve never made a friend in this neighborhood I’ve been able to sustain — and I have tried.

Although I say I’ll go back to Poldark and now accompany my writing with Outlander — finally or really — I don’t care if these are despised by the established literati.  It’s what I love: Historical romance and historical fiction.  (I cannot write the biography I am capable of because the son will not cooperate, I would need to travel and also socially interact with all sorts of people. I never realized to what extent a biography depends on social and traveling skills as I do now consciously.) Yes because historical romance and fiction are escapist & high literary imaginative achievements.  They come out of other books.  And also because I can identity with the heroines as I cannot with many contemporary heroines.  I could instead write on Trollope or try a sequel or post-text out of Austen or another beloved set of books.

I’m getting myself to drink water.

Izzy is walking in Highline Park and this is what she sees through her cell phone camera

This past Friday I sat next to a woman in the Films Moral, Political, Social, Aesthetic class I’m taking again. Every other term the teacher does it — usually brilliant artful films, that often I’ve never seen — though sometimes I have. When the class was over we had this conversation:

She expressed her displeasure with the hybrid form. She said she may not be there next week, remarking: “there is nothing I’m getting that I would not get at home.” She got to talk to me! What she said interested me because it showed how differently she thinks about these classes than I do. She told me some interesting information about Italy at the time of the film we had discussed in class (The Bicycle Thief). Why not speak up? She seemed to think that would be too much like a “little lecture.” I said you could keep it short. She didn’t have that much, only that she had lived in Italy for 10 years, recognized the neighborhoods the film occurred in and could tell whether class ironies were going on and where. I said when I am a SGL (teacher at OLLI at AU) I love such contributions. She was not convinced — I said she would have informed us. She appeared not to care in the least for my opinion. Did not seem to hear it.

Then I said to her comment that in person is not worth it to her, that in a class I taught in person I know within a few minutes who has not understood the text — remember I’m a literature teacher. That I couldn’t have told that on zoom. Therefore I became so much more effective a teacher because I could respond to that — I meant I see my task as improving understanding of books. Her reply startled me: well, you see why I prefer zoom. In other words, she would not want me to know she didn’t understand. So what does she come to classes for? Not out of any respect for the teacher’s discipline or training.

This woman didn’t value the social experience either.  She said she was getting nothing more from coming to the class than she gets from zoom.  I quite agree that the social space upstairs has few people in it nowadays but that’s because the people seem not to value it. Covid is not going away; they’ve been vaccinated to the hilt and yet they don’t come. I wish someone would explain to me what neurotypicals get out of social experience? Jim used to say much of the social experience we have here in the US is dysfunctional if you thought it was for making friends.

A small mammal, one of the earlier ones from which this human race sprung

I am following and enjoying Izzy’s trip with her by following the pictures she puts on twitter.

Stay for me there, I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And every hour a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my west …
— Henry King, after the death of his “matchless friend,” his beloved wife

Those who are left are different people trying to lead the same lives … (Winston Graham, Warleggan)

Autumn from Window — idealized image by Barbara Pommerenke

Ellen

Oft in danger, yet alive/We are come to seventy five; Sondheim, the man, is gone; Barchester the cathedral, & Belfast, the movie

I have learnt since Jim died, always knew, I would be very lonely were I to have to live alone. Not only do I have Izzy with me but during the day I maintain contact with lots of people on the Net — through the listservs I moderate, on the FB pages I join in on, even twitter I have a few acquaintances now. Then there are nowadays these zooms. People respond to my blogs; sometimes even now to my website. So I’m rarely w/o company.  Hardly ever, if you include Clarycat, ever by my side.

Dear friends and readers,

A sort of milestone. If 3/4s of a century is not a milestone, where are milestones to be found.? I am amazed I’ve reached this age, but here I am. Above you see the silly present I bought for myself. This must be my third doll of this type:  Colin, my penguin; a doll I bought at the Native American museum who I was also charmed by; and a silver Christmas squirrel.

Saturday, November 27th, I bought sweet Rudolph while wandering around the local CVS pharmacy waiting for Izzy to get her third booster: process includes presenting an identity card, her vaccination card, 5 minute wait, and then the vaccination jab, then fifteen minutes more. We decided not to wait until Kaiser called her (they had said soon, but no appts offered) when we read of Omicron Covid. The name is ominous. While there, I counted 7 people arriving, waiting for, getting jabs, waiting 15 minutes again. There was one who had just left. As we left, I saw another person coming up. A steady stream for this pharmacist.

November the 29th was a cold and short day, but pretty. I managed to be happy a good deal of the day — it was a kind of work but I did it. Many wishes for a happy birthday to me on FB and a few on twitter. some with real warmth. I put on FB this poem by Johnson to Mrs Thrale which Jim once wrote out to me:

Oft in danger yet still alive
We are come to seventy-five!

Remembering when Jim copied out Johnson’s poem to Hester Thrale ….

Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at seventy-five;
For, howe’er we boast and strive,
Life declines from seventy-five …

Mrs Thrale had been pregnant by that time 10 times. By age 40 I had had three hemorrhages, two as a result of miscarriage or childbirth. In the evening Laura came and drove us to Il Porto Ristorante. Laura is now mature and she showed us a good evening. We had good talk, my central dish lobster in creamy sauce with pasta (I didn’t eat enough of it), and then a walk by the Potomac. Since I can no longer drive, I go out at night very rarely. Thus it was a treat. I remembered the last time I had been in Old Towne late at night: one summer night with Vivian where I had had to park the car in a difficult space. Vivian is gone now. Here is Izzy’s photo that morning.

Getting ready for work — she is looking more like a traditional librarian every day.

In the mid-afternoon I attended the Barchester Cathedral Trollope Society zoom: John Christopher Briscoe has imagined a history of Barchester Cathedral from Anglo-Saxon era through the Roman into the English gothic and then 19th century. He’s an architect and historian, used picturesque drawings of cathedrals (with cats) from the Anglo-Saxon to the 19th century eras. The charm is also Mr Briscoe is a fan of Trollope’s and has done this out of love for the books.

An original illustration of M.R. James’s story, “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”

Clive Swift playing the central role of curate

Afterwards much talk of (among other things) other writers who have written up cathedrals. I mentioned Joanna Trollope as someone who might have — under another pseudonym, Caroline Harvey, she has written stories that are take-offs from Trollope — she uses Trollope characters’ names. They are sort of sequels — sequels come in many varieties; she updates, but then also uses the clerical milieu for similar sorts of psychological-social stories and uses names of Trollope’s characters transposed — there’s a Mr Harding and an Eleanor &c&c. One person said there is a cathedral in her The Choir and it’s based on several cathedrals in England (especially Rochester); that’s written under her own name of Joanna Trollope, and is an original fiction.

I also remembered that M.R. James, a writer of uncanny unnerving ghost stories — truly finely written, subtle – has one set in a Barchester Cathedral — “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” it’s called; it was adapted by the BBC for an hour’s film and starred Clive Swift who played Mr Proudie in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles. Some of M.R. James’s books are beautifully produced — lovely paper, illustrations, introductions, the lot. Jim enjoyed them mightily and bought the beautiful books. He read aloud a couple of the stories to me.

I have Joanna Trollope’s The Choir and will read it next: there is an audiobook still available on CDs, & there was a film adaptation. I started it last night Very readable in her usual way. You can recognize her too. Hers are stories that deal with the social-psychological traumas of the 20th century, which are also political issues too, using the troubles and contradictions of middle class family life in milieus that recall Anthony Trollope’s.

Trollope’s Orley Farm is the next “big read” for the zoom group; it will start mid-January, and I did volunteer to do a talk on Millais’s illustrations — I wrote about the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels in my book, the chapter I’m most proud of, which was praised by Mark Turner (a respected Trollope scholar). Dominic Edwards promised he’s do the necessary for the share screens.

As I described above, evening Laura came and we went out and we did have a good time. She is now grown up at last. She is leading a happy life for her, but she knows she is not developing her talent for real. She says there will be no great book — and no children. So she lives with her choices. She has a full social life with Rob. She tells me some of their friends have died and it is NOT unusual in the US for adults to die in their 40s or 50s — overwork, despair, sickness not treated or badly treated. The US a cruel society to its ordinary people — unqualified uncontrolled capitalism (now in danger of creeping into dictatorship of a religious-based fascism).

Another reminder of Jim that day: Stephen Sondheim died. How Jim loved the music, the lyrics, the books, the full-blown musicals. We went to so many; one summer the Kennedy Center became a temple to Sondheim, and the last night there was spontaneous singing groups around the building. For two Christmases in a row I bought Jim Sondheim’s memoir as edition of his musical scripts, photos, writing all about them. Here’s the blog I wrote about 2 months after Jim died: I begin with Into the Woods.

And then a clever parody:

This is unfair but funny. It is true this is the kind of Sondheim song that gets to be very popular and that people try to belt out or listen to Elaine Stritch belt out (or Bernadette Peters croon), but he is far more varied than that. Still Alan Chapman has caught something; on Sunday Lin Manuel Miranda led a group of singers and actors from Broadway to have a songfest on Times Square.

The Chapman seems to me hostile. “On an Ordinary Sunday” made me choke up because it is about what a New Yorker walking in Central Park might see on an ordinary Sunday. I remember the first time Jim, I & the girls saw the musical — at the Arena, the astonishment at the picture, and the beauty, harmony and hope of it all … the poignancy of not appreciating the little joy we have in life.

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Not done yet. Yesterday I had another rare treat: went out with a friend to lunch, to a restaurant of the day time type which caters to “ladies who lunch,” and the food was a wonderful half sandwich and cream of tomato basil soup. Afterwards we went to see Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. I admit I wanted to see my heroine-actress Caitriona Balfe, and knew Ciarhan Hinds might steal the show. He did, but Judi Dench was given the central moments for her speeches. My review:

Alas, it is not a great film — Branagh just never seems to reach that point of direction, conceptions, work a writer  where the film transcends. And it is also over-produced in the way of most movies that turn up in movie-theaters. The movie must jump out at you viscerally; the audience must feel there’s nothing too subtle for you here, not to worry. It’s being over-rated but it does have power.

The problem is what’s interesting; Branagh pretends to be doing a 1950s movie in part. It’s not only in black-and-white, but done on built sets. This reminds me of Hitchcock, but it’s not to have total control — it’s to convey something about the 1950s. I’m not sure it convinces because of the modern over-producing — despite heroic efforts to make a period film, to recreate  the 1950s visually, by sets. The acting by Balfe, Hinds and Dench (she is given less but what she is given is central) terrific — I almost didn’t recognize Balfe as her voice is so different from Outlander. Maybe she over-does the working class Irish accent.

Caitriona Balfe as Branagh’s mother and Jamie Dornan as his father — enjoying dancing on an old-fashioned rock ‘n roll dance floor

Critics have said it’s too distanced but I am not sure they said why or how. One example, throughout the movie we see famous 1950s kinds of movie (maybe 40s) on the TV set. Several against violence but I suspect they are Branagh’s favorites. He is there as a little boy and we see how smart he is (there are literary allusions) but the how much movies meant to him is kept detached from him. The movies are just part of what is watched. Well at one high point of violence, we hear strains of High Noon (which we’ve already glimpsed on TV); this breaks the suspension of belief, and I think destroys the scene which is not over-the-top in emotion. We needed to be left in the scene to made to care.

It is also somehow upbeat with the opening in color of modern Belfast and the closing. And the fable itself which has the most purchase on our emotions through Balfe’s irrational attachment to Belfast – she should want to get out. The theme is a contrast between those who leave (and all they gain, including the child Branagh who grows up to be an actor, director, movie-producer) and those who stay (the grandparents who must).  Branagh’s father, the husband of the film has a job in London and he’s been offered help to transfer. Only because he is in danger of his life if he doesn’t join the Ulsters and his sons too does his mother agree to go. All her roots are in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  I remembered how I hated coming to Virginia and understood why even if NYC at the time was a terrible existence for us I found myself so isolated alone an outsider here, and still am.

But then cannot have a downer or it won’t sell. So we return to the tourist and rich part of Belfast at the end and Dench’s stoic endurance as she stays,  now a widow. The film is dedicated to those who left, those who stayed and those whose lives were suffering and ruin. A charitable way to see this is Branagh thanking his parents.

It has an archetype:  Cinema Paradiso, where a similarly appealing boy-child finds comfort and meaning in movies and grows up to make it big in the industry ….  Will we never stop focusing on the troubled background of white successful males … ?

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I have been reading away, wonderful deep fulfilling books by Iris Origo, Christa Wolf, and on them: my winter course will be a continuation of last spring: 20th century women’s political writing. Both trace the rise of fascism, and the thwarting of women, the limited roles allowed them – much more. Latest iteration:

Retelling Traditional History from an Alternative Point of View

We will read two books which retell stories and history from perhaps unexpected and often unvoiced points of views. In War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, Iris Origo (British-Italian, a biographer, and memoir-writer, a literary OBE) retells the story of World War Two from the point of view of a woman taking coping with war as experienced by civilians as the chatelaine of a large Tuscan estate. Then Cassandra & Four Essays by Christa Wolf (a respected East German author, won numerous German literary-political prizes) the story of Troy from Cassandra’s POV, no longer a nutcase but an insightful prophet written after the war was over, with four essays on a trip the author took to Greece and her thinking behind her book. The immediate context for both books is World War Two: they are anti-war, and tell history from a woman’s standpoint, one mythic, the other granular life-writing. I will also recommend people see an acclaimed film about the GDR’s Stasi, The Lives of Others (available on Amazon prime): the heroine’s story is partly based on the life of Christa Wolf.

The heroine of Quest for Christa T is Christa Wolf, and also the Lila of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which I have at long last finished reading, but by no means finished writing about or reading her (next The Lying Life of Adults). Ferrante’s rage ignored by the muddled critical Ferrante Letters. Of course it’s all by a woman. Deep alikeness and despair extends to Hannah Arendt, Bachmann’s Malina, Anna Segher’s The Seventh Cross. Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 the male equivalent of War in Val D’Orcia.

Alas, omnicron-covid is making the spring look more problematic at OLLI at Mason, where I have been surprised to discover the people are not eager to get back in person, so I said if my spring Anglo-Indian novels gets less than 10 registering in person, I’ll switch to wholly online, and learn about hybrids by attending one in the spring. It looks like at OLLI at AU, doing it in person is what’s wanted. The two places differ: unlike OLLI at AU, OLLI at Mason cannot get academics enough to truly teach a literature course for 8 weeks. My zoom chat tonight with kindly Aspergers friends we all talked of the uncertainties to come, worries about omicron …

How did I get here? I never expected to but I do understand more now.  I am 75.

Ellen

Post-Halloween: Izzy’s new song, plus ça change …

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life … And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookstore [not so much that latter as the days of vast caverns of books, floors of them, you were left to explore on your own, i.e., the Argosy in NYC, 2nd Hand Bookstor in Alexandria, Va are gone forever, or so it seems mostly …] — Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

Friends,

I thought I’d begin with an autumnal poem, W.B. Yeats’s “When You are Old” as read by Tobias Menzies:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Equally moving for me is Izzy’s latest song, “All I want” by Toad the Wet Sprocket:

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Last night was Halloween, and from my hour-long zoom chat with Aspergers friends, to the few people I talk and email with, I was wished a happy Halloween. We did try: Izzy thought she was invited to go to a party on Saturday night by a man in her Wednesday in-person Dungeons and Dragons group, but when the time came close it seemed the party was to be an hour long or so, after which it would break up into people doing different things together, among these, bar-hopping. This is not for her, especially as getting there was an Uber (and back). So she thought the better of it – she is now getting older than many of the late 20s people who would show up, several gay (as the man was gay), what she had to wear was the regency dress she wore for JASNA (not appropriate for this, too naive). Instead she recorded her song.

I had hoped to join in on giving out candy for the first time in years as I still have the battery-operated candles I had found for Biden’s night-before-inauguration so I could light up my pottery pumpkin, put the stoop light on and be all welcoming. Well I got three groups and one lone girl in a clown’s outfit. Next door and across the street from me are older women too, who also had welcoming light and symbolic objects — they seem to have gotten the same groups. And then it was over.

As has happened to me before, I discovered that there is little to join in on if you are trying simply to be part of a neighborhood community. Halloween you must go to a party, some 15 years ago, for two years running at the Torpedo Factory museum in old town, a Halloween dance was held, for the public & Jim and I went; one year we traveled to NYC to go to a Halloween dance at the Princeton club (as members of the Williams — old-fashioned rock for people mostly in their 50s too).  Thirty-five, say 1980s when we still had a (what I called) Welfare project down the hill, endless children and adolescents came, many Black. Thirty years ago in this neighborhood (all private houses, as we say in NYC) there were several floods of children coming through this neighborhood, and I’d give out candy, chocolates, cookies, pretzels with Izzy.  Twenty I went myself with Laura and Izzy (age 15 say and 9) with them in costume trick-or-treating. I’d stay back on the sidewalk and there were really lots of people. But this neighborhood changes every 7 years, and about twenty years ago, the welfare project was knocked down, super-expensive houses and condos with what’s called a few row of “scatter-site housing” for people getting subsidized rents, built in its place. Ten years ago or more a scheme in my neighborhood not to let most of their children trick-or-treat but make a party. Immediately it’s exclusionary of course. Excuses like strangers put razors in children’s candy. Tonight I wondered if the upper class mostly whites here did not like the children from elsewhere

A photo Izzy took that lovely afternoon as she stood by the Potomac in Old Town

I was advised to watch movies, told by others that’s what they did — horror ones — so I told myself I’d watch movies too and my choice was Shades of Darkness, a 1980s series of hour long adaptations of ghost stories, all but one by women, done with great delicacy, insight, mood creation. I bought it sometime after 2000 as a DVD — I watched one I’d seen before and one I probably hadn’t. Elizabeth Bowen’s “Demon Lover,” very well done, as much about WW2 in England, the Blitz as about this ghost that seems a distilled eruption of senseless indifferent harm I’d seen it before but have forgotten how well done. Dorothy Tutin, the central figure. This is a traditional ghost tale where the ghost is malign and we are made nervous because the whole experience is regarded as fearful, hostile — popular Kafka stuff in a way.

Dorothy Tutin as our Every ordinary women profoundly disquieted as she sees him across the room …

The other May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor” (first time seen), to me a strange ghost stories to me because the ghost is simply accepted as part of universe and the theme is we are supposed to understand the revenants, accept them — not pitiless mischief, but the ghost a redemptive pitiful ghost. The human story is dreadful — people can be dreadful and have very bad luck, but the ghost, unprepossessing as she is, brings renewal. John Duttine, the hero, often played deeply sensitive men in the 1970s-80s BBC dramas. I’ve read other Sinclairs of this type. This set includes two superb hard gothic Whartons, “Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and “Afterward” (stunning). This was an era of fine dramas from the BBC — and there are other series of this type — all June Wyndham Davis produced.

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Lucy Worsley getting to sit behind Austen’s writing desk with some paraphernalia Austen would have used

So my teaching and scholarly life went on. Some successes: my two classes on The Prime Minister are going very well. My paper, “A Woman and her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen,” went over very well and I much enjoyed the virtual EC/ASECS. I’ve not yet returned to Anne Finch, though the term is winding down, because I changed one of my books for my coming 4 week winter course teaching at OLLI at Mason, and am very much engaged by the books:

Retelling Traditional Tales from an Alternative Point of View

We will read two books which retell stories and history from perhaps unexpected and often unvoiced points of views. In War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, Iris Origo (British-Italian, a biographer, and memoir-writer, a literary OBE) retells the story of World War Two from the point of view of a woman taking charge of her Tuscan estates during the war. Then Cassandra & Four Essays by Christa Wolf (a respected East German author, won numerous German literary-political prizes) the story of Troy from Cassandra’s POV, no longer a nutcase but an insightful prophet written after the war was over, with four essays on a trip the author took to Greece and her thinking behind her book. The immediate context for both books is World War Two: they are anti-war, and tell history from a woman’s standpoint, one mythic, the other granular life-writing.

I’d get a crowd if I were doing Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, but no one needs me to teach these. I’ve learnt that Florence Nightingale wrote a novella turned into polemic essay, Cassandra, only published recently: beyond protesting the restrictive life of an upper class Victorian young woman, exploring her own depression, it’s an exposure of the Crimean war. Finally an excuse to read away books on and by these two brilliant serious women.

A modern Cassandra: Wolf has Aeschylus’s proud victim in mind

I got involved in a wonderful thread on Victoria when I told of my coming Anglo-Indian Novels: Raj, Aftermath and Diaspora (I’ve told you of this one before), this spring at both OLLIs and in person. I told of books and they told of books, and we all dreamed in imagined company. My thanking people included this:

I did send away for the Metcalfs’ Concise History of India, and Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India (2016 in the UK). I have the Dalrymple volume on the East India Company and am grateful to the pointed to the specific chapters. There’s nothing I like better than articles when I’m looking for concision and I have access to the George Mason University database and their interlibrary loan.

My course itself is not on the Victorian period as all three books were written in the 20th century: the first is Forster’s Passage to India, and I have got hold of his Hills of Devi, and a book of essays published in India about the relationship of his time there and books to India. One book I have read and is about 19th century colonialism through 19th into 20th century books (novels and memoirs) is Nancy Paxton’s superb Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947

Not for this course but about the 19th century and colonialism through another and classic 19th century novel is the Dutch Max Havelaar; or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1859), using the pseudonym he often used Multatuli . Now this is a superb book where you will learn that not only the British were stunningly brutal to native populations when they took over, but also how the colonialists did it. It’s a novel that is heavily true history (disguised only somewhat) – a peculiar imitation of Scott as if through a lens like that of Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Dekker risked his life while a resident manager in Indonesia (and other places) and came home to write this novel.

I strongly recommend it – and it’s available in a beautiful new edition by New York Review of Books, paperback, good translation. I just so happen to have written a blog last night half of which is on this novel – the other half a film adaptation which descends (in a way) from it, Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (by way of an intermediary 1964 novel). Arguably MH is most important one volume 19th historical novel about the Dutch in Indonesia. The volume includes an interesting introduction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an important writer and political activist (spent too much time in prisons).

The other two for my course are Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, the 1st volume of his Raj Quartet (a historical novel, familiar to many people through the superb BBC TV serial in the later 1980s); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake (a book showing the diaspora). The movie I’ll assign is Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah, which I also cannot praise too highly

Outlander begins in Scotland, Inverness, at Samhain or Halloween — it is also a ghost story

I’ve splurged on two beautifully made copies of the first two books of Outlander (Outlander & DragonFly in Amber) for my birthday and am back reading these books at midnight after realizing I’d been dreaming for sometime of myself in an Outlander adventure. By the time I was fully awake, I had forgotten the particulars and wonder what was the prompting: it’s been weeks and weeks since I last watched an Outlander TV episode and months since I read in one of the books. Maybe it bothers me that I don’t have Starz so will have to wait to see Season 6 until the season comes out as a DVD.

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The cat meowed — the first voice of the series

I do most days need some cheering up, so often so sad that right now my movie-watching includes this year’s All Creatures Great and Small, the set of DVDs sent me by my friend Rory. They still my heart with the strong projection of love, understanding, kindness between one another. I am especially fond of the direct emphasis on the animals the Vets and everyone else too are caring so tenderly for. The first episode opened with an temporarily ill cat being taken care of by James (Herriot, Nicholas Ralph). As my daughter Laura (Anibundel) wrote: “Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter.”. I regret only that there are only six for this year, so I’m re-watching last year’s seven. Re-watching beloved series is what I do a lot.

Izzy and I did vote early, this past Saturday at our local library. We got there early and found a reasonably long line. We were told turnout is high. Everything was done peacefully and democratically. No one there to intimidate anyone. My neighborhood is showing signs for Youngren and I’ve encountered the seething racism in many of these rich whites — they will vote GOP because they are most of all about their status (and feel it’s threatened by not having whites in charge), see Black people as dangerous and inferior, and yes the campaign against Toni Morrison’s Beloved has traction. The GOP even has a mother-type inveighing against the book in a campaign commercial.

One reason for this is it’s not a good choice for a high school class. It’s too hard (not linear at all); its content is problematic: the use of the ghost is part of a skein of irrationality and violence justified in ways that most high school students will not understand. But she won the Nobel, and this is the most famous one: much better, more appropriate are Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (varied, sane, also about economic structuring to keep people poor), Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s Piano (Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is rightly assigned in junior (3rd year high) years. But this is an argument for people teaching literature to think about. Youngren is insinuating profound resentment, implying this book teaches white children to hate themselves and their parents. The reality is it’s a book too hard for students to take in, with some of the same problems of vindicating violence you see in popular US movies. I never assigned Twain’s Huckleberry Finn after seeing a Black young man get up and do a talk about how painful it was for him to read such a book and hearing white boys in the class snicker at him. The choice of Beloved tells about the conformity and non-thinking of US high school curricula than anything else.  And now it’s weaponized against Democrats and liberal gov’t.

If I could bring Jim back, I’d give up all I do — for I wouldn’t be doing much of this probably, wouldn’t have known of the OLLIs, of the Smithsonians, become part of these zooms, but I admit it does make me feel good that I prove to myself and do cope with so much nowadays. Today I resolved two bill problems from goofs I made in using websites to pay my bills — I now get e-bills for seven of my bills (post office becomes worse each week). I’m not as afraid as I used to be — though still frightened some (terrified at what could be done if the GOP cabal does take over), at least I know so much more about all that I need and do related directly to my life, who to go to (AARP, EJO-solutions for my computer, Schwabb guys for money). It is good to feel capable and useful and appreciated – though I began with the Yeats poem because Jim was and will be the one person in the world who loved the pilgrim soul in me. And every day, every night I feel his lack. So much I could do were he here, so much I miss out on (the new Met Meistersinger 6 hours!) how he would have reveled in it.

Ellen

Nearly 8 years a widow

Sophie Thomson as Miss Bates: in the 1996 Emma: I dislike most of the movie, but her performance as Miss Bates and the way she is filmed is the best Miss Bates of all I’ve seen

My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)

Friends,

On October 9th of this year, Jim will have been dead 8 years. I have learned many things since he died (because I had to or die myself), and much has seemed to change or alter in the world over these years (not fundamentally but surface changes make a lot of difference to individual ordinary relatively powerless lives). I wish sometimes I had behaved differently when Jim was alive but I do not believe that anything I refused to do or was lacking in fundamentally hurt or deprived him of anything he wanted.

For myself I am again not not sleeping well. I have periods where I sleep fine (5 hours and a bit more on average) and periods where I don’t (waking in the night, up after 3-4 hours). Just now it is the stress of returning to these classes via zoom, worry the two classes I teach won’t go well, the new relationships, and seeing out in the world that the present peaceful seeming settlement in the US is at risk.

The lack of a close relationship such as I had with Jim is, though, what is very wearing to me. I am not made to be alone I need someone to confide in, to turn to for advice, support. I’ve now tried several friendships and friendship is not a substitute for a partner/loving spouse. I have had a hard time even sustaining these, most have broken up, attenuated, the person moved away or died. No man I’ve met or briefly gone out with (3?) or known more at a distance comes near him for compatibility, intelligent understanding and of course love for me. Nor will there ever be.

I’ll mention this:

For the last few days I’ve had a persistent pain in my chest; for a few days before that side (right) arm has been too painful to lift
sometimes. I did take a weaker pill, one I’m told to take twice a day at 12 hour intervals, and while it helped, the pain did not go away. I don’t feel the pain when I’m standing or sitting up most of the time, some movement brings it out. So I couldn’t do my full set of exercises yesterday. And do them but one a day, trying to walk (earlier) in later afternoon or evening. I should phone the doctor and go. I have said I’m told I have a aneuryism in my aorta.

I suppose you (those who read this frankly autobiographical blog) know that writing itself cheers me up. Writing helps buoy my spirits after I wake and as the day begins. I don’t need the helps visualized in this film adaptation of Mansfield Park (1983), with Sylvestre Le Touzel as Fanny but I know why the picture of her beloved’s ship as drawn by him, the transparencies, and other meaningful objects are set around her on her desk near a window

I am feeling slightly overwhelmed just now. Take this past Monday:

I had 4 zooms. I was dizzy by the end but I will stay with all 4. One, mine (I taught, The Prime Minister at OLLI at AU online), went well, but too many men. I don’t do that well with men. And my anthology is all women and my desire for truer representation on behalf of women, so I may have a small class eventually. 3 people were already not there. They emailed to say they had a conflict and they would watch the recording later in the day. 3 people for the repeat tomorrow later afternoon at OLLI at Mason online have already sent messages to this effect. So recording has a down side in a sense — the classroom experience must be redefined.

I had suspected the teacher for the Theban Plays would be very good — that she is very intelligent and, alone (not with the usual partner) a good teacher whatever she does – and she was — though she did not handle the zoom aspects of calling on people or any of it at all, which did make her presence less felt, less effective (she seems to erect barriers between herself and others). There was the London Trollope Society Zoom at 3 (BST 8 pm) on The American Senator (with two talkers) and then at 6:30 pm EDT another fine teacher (from Politics & Prose) on Wilkie Collins’s No Name. I was probably too tired by that time to take it all in coherently.

No London Trollope Society zoom next Monday and the No Name class is only 4 more. So it will be only 3 more Mondays this 4 zoom line-up will happen.

Meanwhile last night I was reading the book by Fagles (translator, editor, introducer) the Theban Plays teacher had suggested. Wonderfully naturalistically translated. I thought of Philoctetes and how Sophocles made marginalized powerless people his central figures: a woman (all 15,000 spectators men, all actors men) and a cripple. I loved it and wrote my one paper on an ancient classical work on it (with a little bit of help from my father): the teache, a long=timed tenured person hated it and gave me a B. “How could you talk about heroes in this vein?” I am fascinated by Collins’s power of description of the 19th century cityscapes (walking on a wall) and charged feminism of No Name (two heroines completely cut off from any money because their parents married after the father made out his will), and am reading a new edition of Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, early feminist masterpiece, by Stevie Davies (Unbridled Spirits, effective half fictionalized accounting of 17th century women involved in the civil war; Impassioned Clay, with its insight into how historical fiction is ghostly, about the now dead and vanished bought back (one feels that in Gabaldon’s Outlander serials).

I napped twice to do it that day. Just fell asleep around 4:20 (I did lay down on the bed telling myself I was just laying down) and then woke at 5. Again around 8:30 and woke at 9 pm — watching PBS, Judy Woodruff had put me to sleep.

I also “visited” the National Book Festival and for a while listened to & watched Ishiguro manage to make intelligent talk. On a JASNA channel of some sort for about a third of a session, listened to Janet Todd, some of whose books as a scholar I admire, who has written a new novel on Jane Austen (and Shelley I thought but not quite) and whose fantasy I thought might be like Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth, where early 19th century Germany romantic figures who never met meet. Alas, not so; it’s a re-hash of a biography she did of the Shelley women (Fanny Godwin who killed herself, Mary Shelley).

Tuesday so much easier. I re-make lecture notes for tomorrow’s class at OLLI at Mason on PM, and I’ve a later afternoon class at OLLI at Mason on Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I’ll be writing a blog on this book & the Brontes, Gaskell & Scott later next week).

Egon Schiele, Four Trees (1917)

So Anne Finch has been put to the side again, and I’m struggling to do the reading for a paper centered on Austen I’ve promised for October 16th: A Woman and her Box: space and personal identity. Luckily the book I agreed to review for Peter Lang was on Jane Austen, Non-Portable Property and Possessions (not the exact title). (They have not acknowledged receipt of my report nor paid me in the books they said they would. I love getting back to Austen (as you can see from the stills I’m using for this blog), and the books I’ve read for it (Barbara Harding, A Reading of JA; Amanda Vickery on what Katherine Shackleton bought, lived in, made a life out of; Lucy Worseley on JA’s life through her houses once again. I’ve learned about traveling libraries: books put in boxes that are bookcases! A sudden spurt:

Which of us is not familiar with the much-attested to story of Jane Austen hard at work on one of her novels, toiling over tiny squares of paper held together by pins, crossing out, putting carrots and arrows into the lines, second thoughts or words over the lines, on one of her novels in draft. Where?  on that tiny round table, sometimes referred to as her desk, a relic now found in the Jane Austen House museum. We are told that she did not want a creak in the door to the room fixed because it functioned as a warning. Upon hearing the door open she would of course stash these papers away – perhaps in that writing desk, which, another famous story tells us, was filled with many such manuscripts and was almost lost forever on a trip where it landed in the wrong coach? The writing desk is another relic to be found in the Chawton Jane Austen House museum.

The inferences I take from these are that Jane Austen was a woman who had no control over her space and no control over her portable seeming property. She had not been able to place the writing desk on her lap in the coach.  Remember Fanny Price seated in her unheated attic room amid her nest of comforts, not one of which she actually owned, not even the row of workboxes abandoned by the Mansfield Park heir when someone was trying to instuct him using them as a device for organization and storage.

Still it won’t do to say I don’t believe in the first story because I cannot conceive how anyone could produce the artful and controlled four novels.  The first two, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, to some extant flawed, when studied carefully, now and then revealing curious gaps which can be explained by too many revisions, but on the whole extraordinary.  Much less all six famous books, including the posthumous, to some extent, not finished or truncated, named by Austen’s brother and sister, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. For these she must have had far more consistent hours of time free of anxious worry lest someone coming with the right to interrupt create an embarrassed moment to find this woman writing. Is not Emma virtuoso perfection in its use of ironic perspective and voice? Despite what some today might feel to be a narrow rigidity of moral judgment actuating aspects of Mansfield Park, it is arguably as strong a protest and radically questioning as well as aesthetically exquisite book as any of the 19th century novel masterpieces produced in Victorian England.

But there is the table, there the desk and document describing the second incident refuting me.

Such a warm comfortable scene by Joe Wright from P&P — filled with food and things for the table, in a relaxed comfortable aging home:

Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Keira Knightley and Jena Malone as Mrs Bennet, Jane, Elizabeth and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice (2006, Joe Wright)

I am pushing myself every minute I have extra around my other commitments to get this done. I don’t know if I’ll make it as I feel I must go through her letters once more — skimming but taking them in. E. M. Forster wrote one problem he had in reading Austen was he tended to be like someone in a beloved church; I’m like someone scrambling in a coach with her by my side, me holding onto to that writing desk and those papers.

So now I’ll subside into a movie:

I’ve understood that Simon Raven in his 1975 26 part serial of The Pallisers tried to turn the secondary story of The Prime Minister (Lopez, Sexty Parker, Emily Wharton, her foolish brother and strong wise father) into a sort of Washington Square, Lopez into a sort of lion-feline gay and violent macho male cad, Emily a Catherine Sloper who is loved by her father, and was sexually entranced and excited by Lopez, but does not succeed in understanding him, or growing up so at the end she does not set her face to the wall (a la Catherine Sloper) but turned from the world to her father’s arms. Olivia de Haviland would have done justice to this as she could not to the 1940s Washington Square movie (The Heiress) she was inserted into. So you see I’ve been keeping up with watching The Pallisers for this course I’m teaching too — for insights into the novels. For lovely pictures go to: syllabus for reading The Prime Minister together. Here we see both the Duke and the Duchess miserable from the social life they have kept up: it’s from the political story:

Her hands are shaking with tiredness (Susan Hampshire as the Duchess, Philip Latham as the Duke)

All this is the usual screen to what I let you see in my opening paragraphs today as I approach the 8th anniversary of my widowhood. Deep loneliness with a wish I could do the sort of things I could with him. I like the teaching and classes very much  but they are no substitute for the fulfilled reality I had with him, and the sense of security and peace and understanding his presence provided.

Izzy has been without him too. Tonight we watched on her ipad as we ate together a soothing episode of Critical Choice as lovely cartoon, Mighty Vibes: two siblings sitting close, she reading, he working on the computer, keeping us and themselves company. She’s got a new bed coming in early November, and Mr Christbel will take apart her present one (Jim and mine from 1983 to 2000) and put it in the attic with the beautiful crib (first Laura’s and then Izzy’s) no one will ever use again …

Laura’s Charlotte, in a chair, making a mighty mew — one of my grandchildren with 4 paws

Maxx as snugglicious — another

Saturday night our monthly Aspergers meeting online. The topic “personal safety and emergency preparedness.”

Ellen