Good try, but no photo can catch the perfection (Photo: Baryonic Being)

When, oh when, will the third volume of William Manchester‘s The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm come out?

I know, I know.  It’s going to be written not by Manchester, who died in 2004, but by Paul Reid, and everyone is wondering if it will be up to snuff.  So much so it’s a wonder that Reid doesn’t just hide under his bed and refuse to write anything at all.

Such a course of action would not, of course, be in the spirit of Churchill, who was an indefatigable writer.  I wrote about that here.  As Manchester wrote in volume 2: “Only after entering his employ will [his assistant] Bill Deakin discover, to his astonishment, that Churchill lacks a large private income, that he lives like a pasha yet must support his extravagant life with his pen. The Churchill children are also unaware that, as [his daughter] Mary will later put it, the family ‘literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.’ Her mother, who knows, prays that each manuscript will sell.”

His daughter had a lot more to say when I visited his home for 40 years, Chartwell, in Kent, over the weekend.  Mary Soames wrote in her introduction to Chartwell’s guidebook:

“While Winston and his children – Diana, Randolph and Sarah (and later myself) loved Chartwell unconditionally, Clementine (his wife) from the first had serious practical reservations about the whole project. Her prudent Scottish side judged the renovations (involving largely rebuilding the house), and the subsequent cost of running the whole property would place a near intolerable strain on the Churchill’s somewhat fragile financial raft.  She was to be proved right, and over the years her pleasure in the place was seldom unalloyed by anxiety.”

She worried.

No photo can quite do justice to the exquisite ponds and gardens – not much to see in wintertime, except Clementine’s pruned rosebushes, the signs where Sweet William and herbs like chervil grew.  Oh yes, and giant rhubarb, “Gunnera manicata.”  But the green expanses flecked with autumn trees on a crisp and flawless November day must be what heaven is like.  I even saw one of the black swans he painted, spreading its wings in the shrubbery.

I am still munching on the apples from the property, sold for donations – a cooking apple called “Bramley,” and a dessert apple.

Other signs of his labor:  His large painting studio on the property, filled with his canvases.  The small hut for butterfly breeding.  The walls he created as a bricklayer.  Even space for a small pet graveyard, walled off from visitors, but which contained a few white benches for solemn meditation.  Alas, however the house is closed to visitors over the winter – I never saw the heavy-beamed studio I described in the earlier post, where he wrote.

And the books did pretty well, apparently.  When I visited Cambridge, I was told that the Churchill family had endowed Cambridge’s Churchill College.  More than 20 of its members have won Nobel prizes – in keeping with its founder, who was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 1953.

Bastion of sanity in late-Victorian Grim

“I give lessons to Amalie, chiefly in history; she reads a lot and we talk. History is my thing. My Cambridge degree is in history. I’m a Girton girl. If I have any spare time I work on my own notes, which might be a book some day.”

So says the governess Ruth Nibsmith about her young charge, as she conspires with art apprentice Francis Cornish, her partner in intelligence work for the British  in the years leading up to World War II.

Ever since reading those lines in Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone, Girton College has retained an certain cachet for me.  So naturally I jumped at poet Gwyneth Lewis’s invitation to attend the Girton’s annual guest night.

They aren’t “Girton girls,” however, the Welsh poet explained.  The phrase she used often in my brief tour was “Girtonian.”  She herself is a Girtonian, and now the Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow Commoner at her alma mater.  She’s currently working on a fascinating verse play about the “lost years” of Clytemnestra, and just published a new collection, Sparrow Tree, this year.

Gwyneth (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Girton College is way out on the outskirts of Cambridge and is decidedly not one of the architectural wonders of the city.  It was built in the 1870s in the grim, late Victorian style – rumor has it that the backup arrangement was for the building to house an insane asylum, if the college plans fell through.  This was England’s first residential college for women – but you never know what high-powered edjucation might do to the wimmen.

To that end, of course, it brings up the theme of Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, which tackles the prejudices these early women scholars encountered – that novel, however, was based on Somerville College at Oxford.

Gwyneth took me past the Girton room where Virginia Woolf delivered her landmark talk, later published as A Room of One’s Own in October 1928.

We also visited Hermione, a very early woman scholar, in the Lawrence Room – the Roman-period Egyptian mummy (circa 20-40 A.D.) was found in Hawara, in the Fayum, in 1911.  We don’t know much about her.  She apparently died when she was younger than 25, and she’s identified only as Hermionê Grammatikê,  or “Hermione the literary lady” or “Hermione the language teacher.”

Most reminiscent of Gaudy Night was the formal dinner in the grand, high-ceilinged dining room, presided over by Girton’s glamorous Mistress, the geographer Susan Smith.  (I sat next to her husband at the candle-lit table; he’s early-music cornettist Jeremy West, who will be performing in Berkeley next February.)  Sherry to begin, white wine and red wine courses, a cheese course, a chocolate-and-coffee course, and postprandials by the fire.

Chillin'.

I have to take that last bit on faith.  Gwyneth whisked me to the station just as everyone was moving to the fire for more conversation – last train at 11.15 p.m.

Too quickly, alas, to meet the most endearing character of Girton:  Buster.  The once-feral tomcat has been not only adopted by the college, but given some sort of endowment guaranteeing lifetime food and medical care.  Gwyneth says he’s still not above swiping those who become overly familiar.

I’ll have to take that on faith, too.  All I saw was a food dish and his comfortable haunts. Bursar Deborah Lowther kindly provided a photo from her iphone.

Postscript on Nov. 13: Gwyneth kindly sent me the words from the note I saw posted in a hallway, from George Eliot to Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College. The letter, supporting women’s education in the proposed college, is dated 20 November, 1867:

My Dear Miss Davies,

We strongly object to the proposal that there should be a beginning made ‘on a small scale’. To spend forces and funds in this way would be a hindrance rather than a furtherance of the great scheme which is pre-eminently worth trying for. Every one concerned should be roused to understand that a great campaign has to be victualled for.

M.E. Lewes (pen name: George Eliot)

.
(Gwyneth on camera below)

SiCa Presents: Gwyneth Lewis from SiCa on Vimeo.

No exoneration: Polish production of “Nasza Klasa”

On July 10, 1941 in the Polish village of Jedwabne,  hundreds of Jews were herded into a barn, which a Polish mob then burned to the ground. The perpetrators of the massacre were not, as originally thought, the Nazis, but overwhelmingly neighbors.  This atrocity, largely uncovered by Jan Gross’s 2001 book Neighbors, is the subject of a controversial play by Tadeusz Słobodzianek‘s Nasza Klasa (Our Class).

I had not heard of the play, which was performed by the National Theatre in 2009 (you can read about it here and here and here) – not until the presentation by Paul Vickers of the University of Glasgow today at the University College of London’s conference on Polish Literature Since 1989.

I hadn’t heard of novelist Izabela Filipiak, either – though she was educated at Mills College, she is unpublished in English.  The Gdańsk professor’s works were much discussed at the conference, and she was introduced as a prominent public intellectual as well as notable author.  Her remarks on the play brought to light some ambiguous issues about the portrayal of atrocities onstage or in films, especially as time passes and a new generation has lost the connective tissue that attaches them to recent history:

“Paul Vickers argues that Our Class contributes to ‘ongoing Polish efforts to confront the memory of ethnic Poles’ crimes against the Polish Jewish neighbors and classmates during World War II.’ … However, I also agree with a critic from Krytyka Polityczna, Witold Mrożek, who argues that since the contemporary Polish audience cannot identify with Polish characters from Our Class, the play does not facilitate such in-depth efforts.  Our Class is not their class, Mrożek says.  Polish theatergoers are more likely to identify with the children of Jewish merchants who dream about becoming teachers and movie stars, rather than with children of peasants who have no professional ambitions.  To Warsaw theatergoers these Polish characters are as alien as contemporary inhabitants of the so-called “Poland C.”  Anti-semitism thus becomes a peasant issue.  Evidently, it would suffice to educate our peasants, together with our clergy, in order to wipe out the anti-Semitism which sprouts from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other publications rooted in pseudo-scientific research … Wider European audiences are similarly put at ease; since Polish intellectual anti-Semitism was part of European intellectual anti-Semitism, we all become exonerated.  We have nothing in common with Polish peasants.”

Polish author with a California degree

I, too, am nervous about atrocities presented as the act of the other, who is not like us at all, rather than uncovering the roots of our individual, as well as collective, violence and cowardice and complicity.

Vickers responded,  “That’s not a problem with the text, it’s a problem with the kind of people who go to the theater.”  Which is also true.

These remarks of Filipiak’s also interested me, given my recent interest in the degree of allowable fabrication in creating drama from real-life people, in this case I was discussing the movie Anonymous):

“I am also wary about the way Słobodzianek presents the Polish-Jewish couple, the woman having converted to Christianity.  The couple’s history, which includes infanticide and infertility, exemplifies the old prejudice against intermarriage.  Transgressing one taboo starts them on a slipper slope and renders them infertile. I also wonder how the actual Polish-Jewish couple from Jebwabne felt about his rendition of their marriage.”

Said critic Charles Spencer: “It’s a remarkable and powerful play – but not one I would willingly sit through again.”

Postscript:  Uilleam Blacker of Cambridge offered this quotation today, from Przemysław Czapliński :  “…to be an inhabitant of any space today is to be aware that we exist on the pages of a palimpsest, that we walk in the footsteps of those who lived here before us, we write down our narrative in their narratives, we erase the signs of their existence, we add our own motifs to their motifs.”

The Cockney Poet: "The goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit.”

John Keats (1795-1821) is celebrated as one of the greatest poets of the English language, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 25.  His brother?  A ne’er-do-well who scarpered off to America, leaving both his brothers to die young of “the family disease.” 

That is, until Denise Gigante’s The Keats Brothers, published by Harvard University Press (a podcast is here).  Weaving the double stories of brothers John and George Keats with a sympathetic mind and heart, she tells how two men remained deeply committed to each other throughout their lives.  In fact, the case could be made that George was the great love of John Keats’s short life.

“My brother George has ever been more than a brother to me, he has been my greatest friend,” John Keats wrote in 1818.

George wrote nearly a decade after his older brother’s death: “I claim being the affectionate Friend and Brother of John Keats. I loved him from boyhood even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his heart and the nobleness of his spirit.”

The book is making big waves on both sides of the Atlantic.  Here’s a Book Haven Q&A with the author:

After long incubation, sudden acclaim. How does it feel to be suddenly in the news, everywhere?

I’m pleased that the book has been favorably reviewed and even made it to “Editor’s Choice” for The New York Times. But I have learned one lesson: you’re only as good as your reviewers.

Since there is so much reading material and so little time, the general reading public depends on book reviews for knowledge of new events in the cultural world. One assumes, naturally, that the reviewers, at least, read the books. That turns out not to be the case!

I’m afraid that the reviewer for The Independent in the U.K., for instance, did not get much past the prologue. Lesley McDowell’s last sentence of that review shows a painful ignorance of the circumstances of John Keats’s death.

On the other hand, Christopher Benfey’s review for The New York Times and Seamus Perry’s review for the British Literary Review both manage to distill the narrative and thematic ambitions of my dual biography of John and George Keats down to a few incisive—and lively—paragraphs for a general public.

How did George Keats get such a bad reputation? And how do scholars get the wrong end of the stick like that, for so many years?

George Keats left England in 1818 to make a new life for himself in America with his young bride, Georgiana Wylie. His intention was to earn enough money to return to England and support his family—which included his more famous brother—in the lifestyle to which they aspired to live.

George lost his inheritance in a steamboat speculation and returned to London, desperate with a pregnant wife back in Louisville, Kentucky, to scour up more funds. When he left England for America for the second time, in 1820, he had borrowed money from his brother John; he did not realize John was terminally ill.

A couple days after George’s departure, John had his first major pulmonary hemorrhage from tuberculosis, the family disease. John was sick and in dire straits financially—like George—and John’s roommate Charles Brown resented George for leaving the poet in his care. George failed to raise money to send John to Italy, where the doctors ordered the poet to go for the sake of his health. After John’s death, Brown proceeded to blame George for John’s sufferings.

Their mutual friend Charles Dilke later vindicated George, proving that he had not acted dishonestly, whatever one might say about his absence as a caregiver, but the rumors about George’s bad behavior have tarnished his reputation for posterity.

Big-hearted Denise

My effort has been situate these familiar events to us in a more historical, transatlantic context: the collapse of the American economy in the Panic of 1819; an unreliable mail system between England and the Western Country of America; sickness on both sides of the Atlantic; and so forth.

George, too, was a victim of circumstance. He spent the remaining twenty years of his life after John’s death trying to live up to his brother’s memory.

You have indeed situated these events in a bigger context.  We talk a lot about the era of globalization.  Your book shows us again that we aren’t the first to experience its traumas.  The American and French revolutions toppled imperial powers and had international repercussions, and the Industrial Revolution affected everyone.  Can you describe how these quakes affected the Keats family?

The ongoing Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, involving many nations and a global economy, both ended in 1815, the year before The Keats Brothers begins, leaving Britain reeling both in heady splendor—think of the Prince Regent and his retinue—and, for the working classes, in the tribulations of poverty.

Although John and George Keats were not part of either extreme, opportunities for both of them were curtailed in a sociopolitical system based on rank and hereditary privilege. John faced a snobbish conservative press determined to mock his poetic pretensions: he was a “Cockney Poet.”

George could not get a start in any business, and faced years of paying his dues as an anonymous clerk: he became a “Cockney Pioneer,” like the entrepreneurs he followed to the so-called “English Prairie” in the Illinois Territory. He was part of a flood of migration from the British Isles, across the Atlantic and down the Ohio River, to the new states and territories opening up west of the Allegheny Mountains. The New World represented a land of opportunity away from entrenched systems of power and privilege. The reality was often otherwise, as George Keats, like many other pioneers, found out.

Jane Campion's "Bright Star" – more light than heat?

John Keats’s love affair with Fanny Brawne has become the stuff of legend. Jane Campion’s recent movie Bright Star was devoted to the tragic affair between the poet and his neighbor, carried on as John was staring down the all-too-close antagonist, death.

But until George left England, John had always found his closest bonds to be with his brothers. “When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice spleen,” he confessed, “I cannot speak or be silent—I am full of Suspicions and therefore listen to no thing—I am in a hurry to be gone.” He was attracted to women, clearly, but his trust and intimacy resided in his brothers.

After George left for America, and their younger brother Tom had died, John’s enormous capacity for love shifted to Fanny Brawne. The Keats brothers did have a sister, but she was very young and isolated from them by their guardian, Richard Abbey. George was John’s anchor until 1819: the year after George’s departure when John wrote his most lasting verse in the void opened up by his brothers’ absence.

Can you tell us about some of that verse?

“But what without the social thought of thee, / Would be the wonders of the sky and sea,” John wrote to George in the concluding couplet of a sonnet titled “To My Brother George.”

His poetry, following the loss of his brothers, became darker, more introspective, deeper, and more philosophical. The poems known as the Great Odes—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” “To Autumn,” and so on, written in the spring of 1819, after Tom’s death and George’s departure—describe the misery into which the poet had plunged after the loss of his brothers: “George is in America and I have no brother left,” John wrote to an acquaintance that May. “My brother George always stood between me and any dealings with the world—Now I find I must buffet it—I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight—I must choose between despair & Energy—I choose the latter.”

Not a rotter

And choose he did, writing the majority of poems that appeared in his famous volume of 1820, the book that made his lasting reputation. His letters also reveal the profundity of his connection with George, to whom he spoke of life not as a vale of tears, but as a “Vale of Soul-making.” We come into the world, he speculated, as atoms of perception—“intelligences,” the poet called them—that have no distinct personality or identity but that, in the school of hard knocks called experience, a school whose lessons are felt on the pulses, those intelligences become souls. Such a system of spiritual redemption proved no affront to his reason.

You’ve taken on a double narrative in your book.  As a writer, can you describe some of the perils of this kind of writing?

The story of John Keats is as famous as the story of George Keats is unknown. The sections of the book focused on John tend to be more concerned with his imaginative and intellectual life—his thoughts, his emotions, his poetry—while the sections of the book devoted to George are active: where he went, whom he met, what he did. John in fact had an imaginative relationship to the world around him, while George lived in a world that for us today is purely imaginary: a wild landscape inhabited by settlers and Native Americans, keelboats and whisky-drinking boatmen, transatlantic packet ships weighed down with iron to be shaped into plowshares, men gouging out each others eyes after a few drinks in the tavern. The main narrative challenge lay in reconciling the diverse worlds of Regency London and frontier America, keeping the right rhythm between the two brothers.

 Are there any living descendents of John Keats’ family today?

George Keats had eight children and his descendants in America number in the hundreds. Among them is Lawrence M. Crutcher, of Louisville, who is descended from George’s daughter Emma and who has compiled a book, The Keats Family [Butler, 2009], which contains biographical portraits of George’s many descendants.

Fanny Keats, unlike her brothers John, George, and Tom, did not die of tuberculosis. She had six children and lived into old age; her family tree is alive. Crutcher’s cousin, Fernando Paradinas, provided information regarding the descendants of Fanny Keats, the brothers’ sister, which Crutcher has included in The Keats Family.

Rainer Maria Rilke‘s advice to an aspiring young writer took the form of a series of letters from 1902 to 1908.  Letters to a Young Poet has been translated again for Harvard University Press by  Mark Harman, who has translated Franz Kafka to much praise. (A podcast is here.)

The Prague-born poet wrote in German, a little in French.  Here’s what Harmon wrote in his introduction:

He also prized the differing personality, as it were, of each language: Two years later in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé he notes that on the few occasions when he wrote about the same subject in French and in German it “developed very differently in the two languages: which argues strongly against the naturalness of translation.”

The Harvard University Press’ blog cites one of the most famous passages from the letters:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have already asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and are upset when certain editorial offices reject your efforts. Now (since you’ve permitted me to give you advice) I ask you to abandon all this. You look outside yourself, and that above all else is something you should not do just now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There’s only one way to proceed. Go inside yourself. Explore the reason that compels you to write; test whether it stretches its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if the opportunity to write were withheld from you. Above all else, ask yourself at your most silent hour of night: must I write? Dig inside yourself for a deep answer. And if the answer is yes, if it is possible for you to respond to this serious question with a strong and simple I must, then build your life on the basis of this necessity; your life, even at its most indifferent and attenuated, must become a sign and a witness for this compulsion.

It all sounds very grand, of course.  But I wonder how many young writers are prepared to make that decision – who could find “the deepest part” of their hearts even with a GPS.  In my experience, many of them think they must write – it’s a compulsive part of youth. They think they “would have to die if the opportunity to write were withheld.”

But somehow they manage, as the years go on.  For most, the question shifts when balanced against the needs of a  household, or when the old Camry breaks down, or when the medical bills pile up.  Of course, it also shifts as the rejection letters mount, and you find that the guidance from your own sweet self isn’t as reliable as the jalopy’s GPS.  Usually,  the writing compulsion leads to others – and who is to say they’re not equally valid?

It’s only when you’re older, more seasoned, and look back over your life and your choices, and realize that, for better or worse, writing is what you did.

I write from Crotons Cottage on Williams Hill, in a tiny burg called Wootton, near Woodstock, in Oxfordshire (there are at least four Woottons in Oxfordshire, I’m told).  It’s about ten minutes outside Oxford, where some interesting research on social networks is underway,  continuing our earlier thought about the 17th and 18th centuries, and extending beyond a single species and into the primates.

The researchers, led by Jerome Sallet of Oxford University, said the results of the new study bear some similarities to research by other groups working with humans, that related brain size to the extent of social interactions. These studies include recent work that suggested a link between the volume of some regions of the brain and the number of online friends people have in social networking sites such as Facebook.

The new study observed 23 macaques in a number of groups of different sizes. The monkeys were kept in their groups for an average of over a year, and a minimum of two months. One monkey was alone in its cage, but in all the other groups, which had from two to seven individuals, a heirarchy developed in which an individual’s rank depended on the monkey’s ability to form successful social interactions, such as friendships and partnerships.

The study used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of the monkeys, and the results showed that in the temporal areas of the brain associated with social interaction skills, around a five percent increase in the volume of gray matter was found for each additional group member.

So go ahead. Make your brain bigger.  Twitter away.

In the meantime, Dave Lull contributed to the discussion with a link that the internet-savvy approach to information began even earlier than the 17th century From The Dabbler:

The Acta Diurna were daily public notices, posted up in public locations around Rome. Lesson one – put your information where the audience is.

The content mixed dry official news such as the latest magistrates to have been elected with news of greater human interest, such as notable births, marriages and deaths or strange omens. Lesson two – spice up information with interesting human colour.  …

And it was just as inaccurate as it is today:

Whilst out of power, Cicero was moved to complain about the contents of the Acta Diurna for giving others a false impression of what he had been up to: “I receive letters from princes of foreign states thanking me for the part I have taken in making them kings, while I did not even know that there were such persons in the world”. Lesson four – if you want to influence what people think about you, don’t leave it to others to do all the communication.

Bear with me, dear readers, through this internet interval.  My access may be sporadic while I’m in the U.K.  Especially in Wootton.