Author: Anne Dromache

Clarissa’s other party

Doing some podcast catching up over Christmas, I particularly liked an episode of “The Essay” from BBC Radio 3 in which Bernardine Evarista imagines another ending to Mrs. Dalloway.

From BBC Radio 3 “The Essay”

In fact, several things Evarista says in her (audio) essay interest me. Firstly, “To the Lighthouse” was her first encounter with Virginia Woolf, but that contrary to my immediate delight on reading this book many years ago, she as a girl of colour yearning to discover something of herself in the books she read, was left cold by the very white, very English world of the Ramsays, and so concluded Woolf had nothing to say to her. A lot later then came Mrs. Dalloway into the life of the the mature writer Evarista, comfortable now in her skin and in her person, she sees the fearless experimentalist writer that also does “skin”; differently, inhabiting the skin of her characters. Evarista it seems can at last appreciate the unique genius of Woolf. (And, in this audio, speak beautifully on it.)

Thinking of Mrs. Dalloway not so long ago, I too used the expression “a day in the life of” , but Evarista cleverly takes our shared expression one step further; turning it around and adding “…or a life in a day”, thereby getting to the very essence of the novel; unmasking the shallow exterior to reveal the history and complexity of an inner life, and not just that of Clarissa Dalloway, for all the characters carry the baggage that a life brings; strewn as it is with regrets, dissatisfactions, repressions, be they emotional, sexual or matters of practical predicament.

Bernadine Evarista’s ending is a reimagining of the character of Lady Rossiter – Sally – Clarissa’s intimate friend of youth, such that, instead of bowing to the restrictions of convention and society, Sally leads still the spirited, free life so promised in that rebellious girl long ago.

A linguistic minefield

Lionel Shriver writes in Harper’s (paywall or if you’re lucky the one read a month) of the linguistic minefield to be navigated these days in both the written word and in conversation. I suppose I use “lefty lingo” (but in moderation I think), as she calls it, but I too have found myself grating at the (over-) use of a certain vocabulary and terminology in the media. (Do we actually speak like that to each other in everyday discourse?)

I recognise very well Shriver’s irritation with words like “privilege” and “woke”; staples of the progressive vocabulary, and I too struggle with the appropriate formulation of terms relating to “colour” and “slave”, and I absolutely have been known to rant about the lack of precision and lazy use of “cultural appropriation“…

This leads (inadvertently!) to “inappropriate” I guess, and “problematic” and “troubling”; almost always relating to (mis-) behaviour – rather ordinary words that, extraordinarily, have become somehow tainted through excessive repetition.

There is something, in my opinion, to Lionel Shriver’s thesis that this conformist language identifies cohorts, and its prescriptive tone excludes others. Did I say “others”? A word I have identified as having been given a particular emphasis beyond that of a common determiner. Who defines “others”? These excluded “others” definitely do not fit within the accepted parameters of contemporary speech, in which an “other” is more likely to refer to a “minority”, and to be then further complicated by “marginalised communities” being a preferred term here.

I find myself thinking about the UK elections just won and lost in the northern counties and towns of England, and just wonder at how cranky some voters may very well be, there, where a night at the pub doesn’t revolve around “identity” at the mild end and the “cis-heteronormative patriarchy” at the extreme, and where people may well feel “marginalised” and any “privilege” well earned.

It’s complicated [sic].

From page to stage

Virginia Woolf’s “orlando”

Should anyone be in doubt of the quiet subversive lurking in Virginia Woolf’s work, or of her relevancy almost eighty years after her death, should read, or return to, her 1928 novella Orlando. Something I intend doing, so that I can think and write about it from this particular place in time (and ‘place in time’ is at the essence of this work). One really just has to contemplate the language and concerns in our every day – gendered and fluid, and in accord with biology some would say – to recognise in the radical Woolf a version of ourselves.

Scene from Olga Neuwirth‘s ORLANDO Auftragswerk der Wiener StaatsoperOpera © Wiener Staatsoper

Certainly I am not alone in pondering again this extraordinary work; Tilda Swindon does it a lot and again recently, and just this year there has been a Katie Mitchell stage adaptation in Berlin and Paris (and in London next year). And now, at the Wiener Staatsoper, a production from the Austrian composer, Olga Neuwirth greeted with superlatives – here, a Guardian review.

Mary Anne Evans a.k.a. George Eliot

(22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880)

Also known as? I would suggest really, mostly only known as …

George Eliot (1819-1880), aged 30, François D’Albert Durade (1804-1886) 

George Eliot is remembered by me today, and a very many more I would imagine, on this the 200th anniversary of her birth.

Eliot was someone I read a lot when I was really quite young, and thinking from the here and now about The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch I remember that I seemed to have almost forgotten how much she, and especially these two books, had once meant to me. They were firmly entrenched there in the private literary (and sometimes not so profoundly “literary”!) canon of the younger me but, as it often is as one grows older, passions dim somewhat with the passing of time and (too) often diverted by the seductions of the “new”. This doesn’t have to be seen entirely negatively though; passions rekindled also have their appeal and may even be enhanced by experience. George Eliot then is due to reenter my life – and not before time!

Arbury, Birthplace of George Eliot by Frederick Whitehead, 1906

I’m actually quite surprised that, with the exception of the UK where there has indeed been a number of written pieces and some radio and television programs, there has not been more media attention granted to this absolute giant of 19th century English literature in these days, nor to the best of my knowledge is there a major celebratory biography in the offing.

Some articles I have read focus on the provincial settings (and sensibilities) of much of Eliot’s work, and the inspiration drawn from her own youth and familial relationships – for example this one by Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian. Another interesting perspective, and relatively new to me, is her non-literary – and quite idiosyncratic – work, exemplified by her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. Again, here is a Guardian story in respect to this. And indeed a full text pdf of her translation (from the University of Nebraska) is to be found here, though I cannot of course guarantee its certitude. It should also be said, very few articles written about Eliot could fail to ignore her highly unusual personal circumstances. The following Wiki extract I think makes clear that George Eliot’s complicated private life was also inextricably bound to her work.

…The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78) met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis, although in an open marriage. In addition to the three children they had together, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt.[18] In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her theological work with a translation of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza‘s Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in her lifetime.[19] …

Wikipedia contributors. “George Eliot.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Dec. 2019. Web. 4 Dec. 2019.


I say above “relatively new” in respect to my acquaintanceship with Eliot’s works of non-fiction and translation because it was only on reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead last year, and pondering the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who in Robinson’s novel plays an important role in intellectually influencing (and driving towards atheism) the brilliant brother of the narrator, that I learnt that it was George Eliot who had translated his most well known (and controversial) work The Essence of Christianity from German.

Also, an interesting collection of articles and manuscripts at The British Library may provide a nudge towards becoming (re-) acquainted with Eliot. An excellent time to do so.

The reality of writing

novelist, poeT, playwright: Writers ALL

A very interesting event at the British Library, organised by BBC Radio in conjunction with the Royal Society of Literature, in which some very fine contemporary British voices – Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham – discuss the complexities that arise at the intersection of art with real life events.

It is interesting how they all see their literary forms as a reflective and often non-deliberative response that is essentially different from that of journalism or reportage in that it creates the space to explore nuance and ambiguity and place it beyond the specificity of time; creating context and texture that questions and enhances the everyday experience.

To take the analogy (of the intersection, which I think is mine) further; as at the road intersection, collisions have a way of occurring irrespective of rules and intentions.

I should say that this was, in the first instance, broadcast on Radio 3 in their Free Thinking programme, but it is also embedded in a really excellent podcast called Arts & Ideas available on the website or also at Apple.

(Ig)noble intentions

The yearly hullabaloo of the Nobel Prize for Literature! What is noble for one is ignoble for another.

The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk I know only from reputation, that is, from another prize – the International Booker in 2018 – so I can’t say very much at all. Both that then book honoured, entitled Flights; seemingly a flight of fancy into the fragmentary nature of life and living, and her more recent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, that the review just read suggests as a very original work, have been widely praised. She is in fact more and longer known (and published) in Germany than in the English speaking world, so I will try to get to her work some time soon. Scandal factor: just middling. Feminist, youngish, leftish, politically engaged, controversial in homeland. What’s new?!

Peter Handke. Scandal factor: high! Oh my! Are they blöd oder what! Did they (that is, the new Committee put in place after the scandal(s) that led to the postponement last year) not see it coming! For the obvious reasons of language and familiarity, the furore has raged more on this side of the Atlantic, though that is often so with Nobel controversies given the (unfortunate) coincidence (?) that the announcement usually approximately corresponds with the Frankfurt Book Fair.

No, I haven’t read Peter Handke. And of that, I can at least convince myself, I am somewhat ashamed. He is after all an integral part of the contemporary German literary canon – for better or worse. And why haven’t I? Well I was here and about when the old Yugoslavia was falling apart and new nations were being built and tyrants were aplenty. Handke stood there very much alone amongst European intellectuals in positioning himself alongside the Serbia of Slobodan Milošević and cohorts. So it was in the charged climate of the Balkans 1990s that I first became aware of him, his story, his history, and as a consequence shied away from the writer Handke, and then when the dust settles it is very difficult to get back. These years on, and his political naiveté or moral shortcomings remain (or better said, become again) a matter of controversy, especially for those with a personal stake because of their heritage or sympathies. I get that. Of taking sides, of black and white.

But Handke’s literature, his aesthetic? It is the latter which the Committee holds so high in coming to their decision, as if aesthetic can be as disassociated from the politic as the artist may be from the man? Reasonable people here can come to a different conclusion. Bret Stephens offers in The New York Times his opinion, with which I am mostly in agreement, and is worth reading.

Would anyone want to contemplate all those (prize winners or not) who wrote like angels (some of the time) but were anything but (maybe a lot of the time)? Dickens, Twain, Hamsun, Sartre, Pound, Dahl, Mann, Hemingway, Mailer, Grass … all men I know! The Woolf! The Stein! Sontag. Complex lives all. Ambiguity aplenty. Some got a (the!) gong, some not. Just a very few of the very many with moral shortcomings or sympathies (or more) towards political extremes or accused of discriminating, racist or abusive behaviour.

What to do? It’s complicated.

It occurs to me now that I have in fact read something by Handke – well sort of. A few years ago now, a really nice German translation of that highly unusual marriage diary Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne wrote (in German “Das Paradies der kleinen Dinge”) came my way, and Peter Handke wrote a prologue of sorts that I (think I) remember thinking was just as unusual but I can’t remember exactly why, except that I liked it. What a literary iteration that is!

Will I read him now? I don’t know.

Daring to presume

A new essay by Zadie Smith in the current October 24 2019 issue of The New York Review of Books, and for the moment at least online, eloquently argues against a particularly stringent interpretation of cultural appropriation prevalent in the literary world in recent times and the strident sometimes virulent debates that inevitably ensue, and pleads instead for a fiction that dares to presume rather than contain, that is driven by the imagination rather than the manifest self and finds its voice in revealing what it doesn’t know.

How I have longed for an argument along these lines to be so articulated.

Annie Ernaux & an art of autobiography

I did want to mention the French writer Annie Ernaux. As in the case of Patrick Modiano, my recent readings of two of her books have been in German translation – and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience.  Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews, I took to a hand a new German translation of La Place (“Le Platz”) at my local library; having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews in mostly German media. First published in 1984 (there is a 1992 English translation: “A man’s place”),  I now know it to be representative of the very special narrative form with its highly  (or absolutely?) autobiographical elements that Ernaux has chosen. Perhaps “autofiction” is the correct terminology these days, though absent the “fiction” that also doesn’t seem quite right.

La Place is a memorial of sorts to Ernaux’s father – his struggles, disappointments and modest gains  – from hard, impoverished circumstances at the beginning of the 20th century, through farm and manual labour and two wars to the relative comfort afforded by a small family and “property”  – in provincial northern France; reflected upon by the adult daughter now in her twenties, wife and mother, who has returned to the stupefying closeness of her childhood home that she so eagerly fled in her father’s last days. She too has moved on in life, but further, away from the hard-earned “place” in society that her father fought for and won and defended and had pride in. This narrator, this Annie, had no pride in this “place” from where she came, but irritated by her estrangement from her parents and her roots, she speaks to us and to herself from her father’s “place”, attempting to understand the nuances and conventions that erect then maintain the barriers of class.  But, as much as the subject here may well be the father, his story is very much just a building block to her own autobiographical quest; in channeling the father, Annie Ernaux is on a journey, sometimes painful, of coming back to herself.

Now in the last days I have finished reading Mémoire de fille , in German of course as “Erinnerung eines Mädchens”, and also from my wonderful locallibrary. Published in original only in 2016, (and not yet in English) it fills in gaps, things touched upon but not fully explained in her 2008 and critically acclaimed work Les Années (Ger. “Die Jahre” Eng. “The Years” both  pub. 2017).  Not having read that work (yet!), I can only relate from other sources that it was there that Ernaux conjures (for the first time I think) this very particular voice that also characterizes Mémoire de fille. I must say I was a few pages in before I realised that the “I” (“ich” “Je”) was absent. She takes herself out of time and place; as a third person viewer to her own biography.  She objectifies herself so to speak. She hovers over this eighteen year old that she once was and is both detached and intimately involved, as irritated and sympathethic as any reader may be. She is both unforgiving and non-judgemental of this her former self.  The time span is not great; Ernaux approaches a memory of a just a few weeks in the Summer of 1958 that was consequential and a brief snap shot of the immediate couple of years that followed, dissects the shame that wasn’t there until it became memory, tests the boundaries of belonging, rejection and reconciliation. This literary feat of disassociation that Annie Ernaux achieves in her writing is a triumph over the demons that haunt us all. 

I didn’t mean to write so much here. I need to read some more, especially the much feted  Les Années, and get closer to the writer Annie Ernaux.   Coincidentally today I read a bit of a Q & A with Zadie Smith in The Guardian in which she mentions Ernaux as a favourite: “… and Annie Ernaux changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again”– that doesn’t surprise me at all. And Wikipedia alerted me to this excellent piece in The Paris Review by Laura Elkin that seems to affirm some of the things I was thinking about, including my genre confusion, and gives me much more to think about.