Shades of the past

As I said I would here, to provide some company through the lonely nights of winter, I have restarted my lapsed Netflix account. And, Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s Passing was indeed one of my first treats unto myself.

There have been any number of reviews around the place in the last month or so, but I particularly like this one from Imani Perry for Harper’s Bazaar. Amongst other things, it defends the film against some of the criticism of casting. Perry’s counter argument in some ways presumes the immediate reaction that I too had; that is, it a stretch to imagine that either Tessa Thompson (who plays Irene) or Ruth Negga (as Claire) could have got away with passing as white in 1920’s America. But on reflection, I get the point Perry makes. Perhaps only the obviousness of the performers Blackness, allows the viewer to embrace the Black gaze and to, for instance, imagine the risk Irene is taking when she seeks refuge from the sweltering day in that ritzy hotel restaurant, or to contemplate the nerve and concentration required in Claire’s deception of her racist husband. In both cases the tension is tangible, and the player’s gestures and the subtle movements of camera and lighting enhance the atmosphere of a shared experience.

Like Perry, I was very much convinced by Rebecca Hall’s artistic decision to shoot Passing in black-and-white. Monochromatic mixes to various degrees have become not uncommon in contemporary film and photography; so much so, that one wonders sometimes to what end – to seduce with misplaced nostalgia, to just kind of “look old”? But here, it makes sense in two very important ways: realistically, in terms of the period in which the story is set and symbolically for the stark opposites and all the grey areas in-between suggested by the tonality. And, in both these cases, conjured is powerful imagery of America’s social and racial divide – then and now. The ‘look’ is completed by an intelligent cinematography that follows and gently brushes the characters; there is a blurriness around the edges that blends intimacy and ambiguity – lives and situations not quite focused, out of reach.

I don’t do politics

Well, I actually do, and a lot, just not here! But I will take the time to record here the beginnings of a new government in Germany (that is, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland) today, 8th December, 2021.

A more than unusual, a historical constellation will govern this country for the next four years (in the normal course of affairs). Referred to here as an Ampel (think: traffic lights!) – a coalition that stretches from the gold-gilded free-thinking liberal edges (FDP) to wide strewn sun-kissed green pastures (Grüne), with the once rosy-red, now sadly faded, everyman/woman in-between (SPD).

The latter, with just a modest 25% of the vote, is the largest faction and consequently it’s uninspiring candidate, anything other than an everyman, the political careerist Olaf Scholz, was today elected by the Bundestag as the new Bundekanzler. (Would it be defame to suggest that – after Müsil – Scholz is a certain sort of “man without qualities” but, worse, one who has never taken the time to take time out; so stands there but the bland surface upon which an increasingly intellectually lazy folk can reflect back upon themselves each passing irritation.)

We have, then, a colorful conglomerate with an unremarkable CEO at the helm – but at least a new government has been formed (and in a professional and relatively timely fashion) that has some potential; an approach to governance is suggested that is more adaptable to these fast changing times, and proposals and – god, forbid! – ideas being floated that at least aspire to a vision of a better, more equable future for Germany and a more focused position on the opportunities afforded on the broader, international stage. And, hopefully, an imaginative and competent enough personnel tableau to bring all this to the fore. Four years to do so.

Angels grounded

Mrs. Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, pub. Penguin 2007

Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants – referred to by me here – is indeed a wonderful read, and for many reasons. Significantly, it goes some way in satisfying my curiosity about the complicated relationship of the said Mrs. Woolf with her servants, and, more generally, in offering through this particular example an engrossing and informative account of the domestic power structures of the middle and upper class households (in Britain), and as a microcosm of the hierarchical distribution of power in greater society, from the end of the Victorian era through to the post-war twentieth century. The gap in my own knowledge was quickly apparent – and gaping! – and Light’s book has gone some considerable way towards remedying my ignorance.

Even from the prologue, I was heartened to read that Alison Light’s motivation for writing the book came from her reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and her discomfort, on one hand, and fascination on the other, with Woolf’s language concerning her domestic help over the years, and like me especially with respect to Nellie Boxall. (And I must add: it was just as heartening to hear a British scholar of such standing – and to the Left! – admit to her previous ignorance of the historical importance of domestic service in Britain, and especially for women.)

Broadly chronological, the book traces the history of domestic servitude parallel to that of Virginia Woolf’s life. But ‘parallel’ is a misplaced word here (when thinking about time it may always be!); more precisely, these lives and histories are intertwined in ways obvious and not so; imbued with a public presence that abides by social norms, and a behind closed doors intimacy that is mutually dependent (and, as Light says, unequal); in both spheres easily sentimentalized – then and now.

Woolf is not necessarily the star of this narrative, but rather the accompaniment for the lives of others: of Sophie Farrell, the treasure of the Stephan household in late-Victorian Hyde Park Gate, of Nellie and Lottie Hope, inseparable, in service and out, almost a life long, and of the Batholomews and Annie Thompsett and the Haskins and Louie Everest all who made Monks House the “home” Woolf had needed for her emotional well-being and creative and professional development as a writer. Would she have been generous in accepting this supporting role? I think so, I hope so.

And, as employers, the Woolfs are hardly set decorations – it is important what Light has to say about their role as representative of an intellectual class in the first half of the twentieth century: the disparity that existed between the political and societal agenda that was being propagated and the actuality of a way of life that contributed to the cementing of rigid class structures. I think it is fair to say that it was the highly political Leonard who spoke and wrote loudest on the rights of the working class, but maintained an imperious attitude to those employed in his own home.

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Going, going, gone – Van Gogh (3)

As I have previously discussed (here and here), with the interest and anticipation of the lay person, the Cox Collection was duly auctioned on November 11 by Christie’s – far, far exceeding expectations, it brought in nearly $332 million! My attention was focused on the Van Gogh works, and according to Art News an agent (waving the paddle 619) took home the haystack and the cypress and olive trees (the latter for a staggering $71 million!) – for the same buyer or different is not known. Given the secrecy, I think it is fair to guess that these remarkable works of art, already so rarely seen, will disappear again into a private collection and we – the greater public – can bid [sic!] farewell to their public viewing anytime soon (as with the Portrait of Dr Gachet which disappeared after being sold in 1990 for $82.5m – also by Christie’s). And the fate of the much talked about red-haired, pink-cheeked, flower-chewing boy/girl that so entranced me, and that I considered – seriously showing my art market acumen – to be seriously undervalued (and, I was right; estimated at $5-7 million it sold for $46.7 million!) seems likely to be the same; even in reproduction, I love this picture – ‘they’ would have found a better home with ‘us’ for sure. But who knows, maybe the buyers are fans of the share economy – to be stretched beyond cars and couches and such pedestrian comforts to the much finer things of life (and commerce).

Martin Bailey, who has definitely become my person to go to on all things Van Gogh, blogs on the outcomes of an eventful (not to mention, profitable!) evening in New York.

Writing to remember

Patrick Modiano: “Invisible Ink” (2021)

With not even 150 pages, Patrick Modiano’s latest novel to be translated, Encre sympathique (Gallimard, 2019), is a very quick read indeed. As with so many of the French works that I have turned to in recent times, including other works by Modiano, it too was read in the German translation: Unsichtbare Tinte (trans. by Elisabeth Edl).

And a fine and evocative read it is. Modiano’s reflection upon time and memory is as always exquisite. And as always, people, things, situations disappear and fade over time, but are always lurking there in the crevices of unconscious thought, ready to be awakened and hauled into the present – to be then something other than that which they once were. Or as one thought, for who’s to say just how precise any memory is to the actuality of an event? And who (or what) defines the actual, anyway?

In a search to fill all the empty spaces in a life, the novel’s narrator struggles against the unreliability of his own memories and motivations, and he struggles against the forgetting – which is not quite the same thing as the not remembering. And that has been the life work of his creator; Patrick Mondiano’s gift to his country and the world: all his stories of occupied and post-war Paris and France; often heavy but written with a lightness of being, sometimes dark but uncompromising in demanding of a reader the same degree of reflection and moral fortitude with which he writes.

There is a plot – a mystery, detective story of sorts (explained well in this review at The Spectator) – and it is the scaffolding that supports, holds together, all the fragmentary memories as they traverse time and take us with them; speaking to us from a present back some thirty odd years with some stops in-between, and with the promise of an “end” in the here and now. There is, this time at least, some light at the end of the tunnel.

Mysterious, I said; and that’s what so entrances me when I am reading Modiano: a moodiness, a haziness; as if something not quite tangible is always looming close, never to be wholly captured. (I transgress! I imagine myself now in a smoke-filled Parisian jazz club in the fifties or sixties! Though, in his Nobel Prize lecture, when Modiano speaks of his envy of music being better able to encapsulate the essence of a moment as a continuity of thought and experience, he makes reference to Chopin’s nocturnes – also, to be played in the late hours under the muted light of a different sort of venue I could imagine.) Some may find his style old-fashioned, and I have heard it said that he has only one story that he retells over, and over again, albeit beautifully so. But I disagree, well, not on the last said – I do very well appreciate the unique stylistic elements of Modiano’s writing and his identifiable voice – but only a very superficial consideration could be so dismissive. Yes, perhaps the time frame and the way he approaches that, and Paris, of course, are constants, but I actually feel the ageing of this writer, and not in a negative way, rather I admire how the years affect his retrospection – on other generations and the societies in which they interacted with – and that look is not static. What he has, is an absolute integrity, a commitment to using the power of his pen, his words, to ward off the insidious human tendency of forgetting that which shouldn’t.

As I write, there is another new work from Patrick Modiano, published by Gallimard, again of novella length, and one can imagine translations will be available in a timely fashion.

Small town truths

Be it in the ports and industrial centers of Britain or those of continental Europe, or whether just another small town, like that of Angoulême in south-west France, of which Emma Rothschild tells of in this aeon article, the tentacles of the slave trade and the societies that subsisted from its labors and the wealth accrued through its brutality and the denial of human dignity, stretch across oceans and continents and are indelibly entwined throughout much of modern history; from out of the so-called Age of Discovery, through the years of “revolution” and “enlightenment” and beyond.

Slavery; certainly, long (or belatedly) recognized by most as a monumental moral failing, but too often regarded as an unfortunate consequence of the human quest for improvement and expansion – a weak defense of colonialism and tainted by theories of race and white superiority. Only in the most recent of times, have the complicated threads of slavery come to the forefront of research and public discourse, and as being more than just a factor, but a defining factor, in the course of the Modern era, and one still having a profound (and detrimental) effect on societies around the world. A history revolving around the once accepted narratives of great men and great events has been, if not superseded, greatly complemented by this shifting focus. If telling the story of slavery is long overdue, it is also an important consequence that in doing so other influencing strands in the historical narrative have gained traction – of families, of women and children, about work and play; in other words, the stories of ordinary people who lived and died, who made good choices and bad, and were never just the set decorations to the epochs adorned with the jewels of State – monarchs, politics and church.

Emma Rothschild’s essay compliments her latest book, An Infinite History, in which she explores the extended family of her subject over many generations, bringing to the fore, amongst other things, a complicity in slavery – to be read as a microcosm of that of a greater society, and the responsibilities that follow out of that. As she explains it:

[…] An Infinite History is a micro-history, in the sense that it starts with an individual, and it is also a medium-scale and even a macro-history, in the sense that it moves outwards from the individual, by the relationship of contiguity, to her immediate family, to her acquaintances and neighbours, in the social space of Angoulême, and to her posterity over time. It has turned out, along the way, to be a history of what individuals knew about far-off slavery, and of what it meant in their lives.

Slavery en famille, aeon, 1 October 2021

Emma Rothschild’s book, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries is published by Princeton Press, and there is more information on their website, including a Q. and A. with the author, and another short essay on the “hidden economic lives of women”; also a concern Rothschild develops in her book. I should say, the book has its own website with a number of interesting resources; for example, a family tree and maps.

Below embedded is a short taster about the book – a project, really, on a particular way of telling history – on SOUNDCLOUD.

“An Infinite History” by Emma Rothschild, Princeton University Press, 2021.

House and Garden

Reading (and looking at: some terrific photos!) in this delightful NYT magazine piece about Olivia Laing’s country home in Suffolk, I find myself reminded of many things. Firstly, it prompted a childhood reminiscence of what a wonderful gardener my father was and how much I loved helping him, and how a long ago birthday gift of a simple plastic yellow watering-can is still before my inner eye, and how life then got complicated and time did its own thing with little regard for me, and it came to be that I’ve never had the opportunity to have a garden that I could call my own. And that makes me sad. And, and, and … Secondly, the Derek Jarman journal, Modern Nature, that Laing refers to has been asking to be read by me for a long time – in the UK at least it has a sort of legendary status. And, thirdly (but not really lastly), Laing’s own 2011 book – and her first – To the River, as a “rumination”, inspired by Virginia Woolf and which has her wandering the length of the River Ouse. What that rumination entails I could guess at – but need to know. Two more books.

But this is all a bit by the bye, what really diverted me – as so often happens – was an internal link to the NYT “By the Book” segment from earlier this year in which Olivia Laing was guest and her mention there of Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants that she had read while writing her latest book Everybody (2021), saying: “[…it] is astonishing on the complex interrelations between bodies and class, bodies and gender…”. Light’s original work has come to my attention previously, and Virginia Woolf’s erratic behaviour towards her domestics is well known, and has often been a topic in academia and beyond. And something I have often contemplated.

But my interest at this moment has added intensity because, while reflecting on the mutual dependencies and alternating dynamics at play between Myriam and Louise in the Leïla Slimani novel just read, I was immediately struck by similarities with what I had discerned previously about Woolf’s fraught relationship with her servants, especially Nellie with whom she was in constant struggle; and perhaps encouraged in my thinking having shortly before read an “address as essay” by Slimani in which she quotes from a Woolf essay contrasting the status of the Victorian woman of a certain class – the so-called “Angel in the House” – with the (then) modern woman; the possibilities now open to her, but also the obstacles, sometimes invisible, that remain in her search for fulfillment, and especially when that reach is beyond the sacred bounds of home and garden, of family and servants.

I have downloaded Light’s book (Kindle link below), and have to say the prologue and the early pages – here, the “angel in the house” is Julia Stephen and the cook, Sophie Farrell, the “family treasure”- are a knockout. Already I can say, obviously a labor of love; written with verve and with respect for the subjects and their successes – large or small, celebrated or rarely noted – and an understanding for their failures and the prevailing circumstances – personal or societal or both.

I am, then, as I write, feeling madly indebted to Olivia Laing – and it is hardly to be wondered; to the question of what was the best book she has received as a gift comes the response:

[…] For my 40th birthday my mother gave me first editions of Woolf’s diaries. That was a magical present. I remember being entranced by the bindings as a child — the pale pink and duck egg blue spines with Bloomsbury crosshatching. Those would be my desert island books: the best possible mind to be accompanied by.

The New York Times “By the Book: Olivia Laing’s Reading Piles Are Far From Organized”

Mine are not nearly so fine, but Olivia Laing would surely with me agree: it’s all there to be found in the mind – and Virginia Woolf would add: words, words, words.

When the bough breaks

As mentioned here, Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (The Perfect Nanny in the US and Lullaby in the UK), in German translation as Dann schlaf auch du, did become available in my local library, and sooner than expected, and has now been read by me in the last day or so.

With a narrative that traverses the terrains of crime, suspense and underpinned by what could be interpreted as a social criticism of some aspects of modern family politics, and written in Slimani’s cool and precise style (I actually had the opportunity to browse the French original as I read the German edition), the novel makes for a rapid and compelling read. But, it is anything other than a comforting one. Not the butler, the nanny dun it – that much we know. When from the opening pages one is confronted with such a monstrous conclusion, the reader can not help but become engrossed in the quest to know the whole damned course of getting there.

Welcome into the hyper-stressed sphere of the restless Parisian middle class of young professionals; trying to organize careers and families, to keep up with …whoever are the French version of the Joneses, and ever alert to the social order and codes of their cohort. Such a couple are Paul and Myriam Massé, and they are much more of course, and Slimani develops them well; giving them contour – and contradiction. They interest me these thirty-somethings – juggling their ambitions with mounting insecurities seemingly at odds with their privileges. But with the family perfection of little girl Mila and baby boy Adam complete, Paul, who had found some favor and convenience in the one-partner-at-home model (in this case, the woman – surprise, surprise!), reluctantly acquiesces to the stressed and dissatisfied Myriam’s desire to return to her interrupted legal profession – so, the perfect nanny it must be; and it seems that Louise is just that.

I can well conjure a Paul and Myriam (perhaps I have known enough like them, or at least been informed of), but Louise remains to the very end a mystery to me, a mass of contradictions – her awkwardness in manner and speech; still, secretive, stubborn; a petite stature belying her vigor and strength; her plain, dated attire (peter pan collars we are told!) offset by cheap make-up – worn upon a face often described by the author as “moon face” or “doll face”. It irritated me that I was unable to form in my mind’s eye a more complete image of her. But perhaps that was the writer’s intent or at least an accident of the writer’s imagination: Dear reader, Slimani may be saying, think of Louise as an apparition blurred under the pale light of a full moon or some malleable figure with features painted upon china or plastic; garishly exact and without blemish. Neither are real, both an illusion. A mother’s worst nightmare.

For some readers, without proximity or at least awareness of the particular young, urban, professional milieu in which one is being drawn, the sociological aspects that may be read into the novel are somewhat elusive, and perhaps even inadequate as an explanation for the development of the plot; which I interpreted more as being psychologically driven. But deep seated norms are there to be extricated, and ultimately play an important role in the tragic human consequences. Parental choices made in modern societies are clearly complex – professional, financial, emotional considerations aplenty. But before that comes the choice to be a parent, and especially Myriam wonders at that; wonders at her own inadequacy and ineptitude – so conditioned is she in the absoluteness of the maternal role. Myriam thought she could have it all, failed to recognize the obstacles in her way, that cared not for her education, her abilities, saw only her sex. And wrong choices can be made, and most do not end with such a monstrous crime. (It should be said, Leïla Slimani based her novel on a 2012 murder in Manhattan; keeping some of the personal and class characteristics that were reported but transporting the situational to Paris.)

Expectations of a mutually beneficial alliance are negligible and the potential for conflict are high; for those (predominately) women who work in child care in some form or other – women like Louise and all those other nounous in the Parisian playgrounds – are often employed under precarious circumstances and for low wages. They may be immigrants or foreigners, students perhaps, and in this, Louise, as a white middle-aged French woman, differs; here, Slimani may have been deliberately making a character choice that defies the delusions of a society entrenched in its belief that all dangers come from without. Paul and Myriam could barely hide their satisfaction at not having to navigate the hurdles (as some of their friends must) brought into their home by a foreign custom or language.

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