One should need not say, but I will: With A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf laid the foundation to a way of thinking, not just about women’s writing, but what it is to be a woman in a man’s world and what it means to be represented in a man’s version of history, that has influenced generations through to the present. Here, in conversation with three who may very well count themselves as beneficiaries of Woolf’s legacy, is Melvyn Bragg’s contribution to the continuing exploration of how a couple of lectures to a roomful of young women in Cambridge almost a century ago evolved into a defining document for the ambitious modern woman – Woolf’s unique contribution to the greater quest for emancipation and equality. (Embedded below from Spotify.)
Coronation Cavalcade
Saturday 6th May 2023.
From my childhood I remember a large red tome embossed with crowns. I also remember its name (or think I do): Coronation Cavalcade. Having come across it during a juvenile rummage around, I remember thinking it to have been published in commemoration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; this probably suggested to me by reliable sources, and I have no reason to believe that was not so. It was chock a block full of black and white photos from that day but also from the young Queen’s childhood and formative years, and there were lots of words too on that shiny paper once favored for such books. There was only one color plate: a frontispiece of the newly crowned monarch in her coronation regalia. (It may well have been like this one.)
There was a fold out royal genealogy attached to the inside cover to which my mother had neatly inked in further unions (she didn’t live to see the procession of dissolutions!) and progeny. My mother was of the Queen’s generation and very much a royalist. Not a silly, fawning sort, mind, but a traditionalist just the same. (And, she did have a sort of ‘queen’ look and disposition: there were hats and gloves and handbags, she loved horses and dogs and the Anglican Church…) What she did not have in common with the Queen was a long life. What happened to that book I don’t know, or even whether I am misremembering all I have just said.
So this day, the Coronation Day of King Charles III, was spent in a state of trying to rise above a surge of sentimentality – and not succeeding , instead being swept along in the moment, nourished with tea and scones and the temptation of nostalgia. The public spectacle was awesome (despite the inclement weather, and what I thought to be my original word play on “…long may he reign [sic] over us…” ) but I was most moved by the very personal emotions that the event stirred – memories and childhood, people and places lost.
A couple of weeks have now passed. What remains (other than a renewed penchant for the much maligned scone)? This newly cast Royal Family – modest now in number, with a more modern agenda – has been dutifully going about their business. Looking good. Doing what they do. Only Time will decide whether the House of Windsor and its hereditary monarchy will continue in its constitutional role in British life. My own Re:publican sympathies are not to be denied, but the ancient isles must decide their own fate. And, that, something which they do with exceptional regularity one has to say!
What is a weekend?
…So asks the Dowager Countess in an early episode of Downton Abbey. Any idea I may have had that it was only my own rather idiosyncratic family that was so amused at the time – not only by the question itself but by Maggie Smith’s impeccable deadpan delivery – that it remains to this day an oft used geflügeltes Wort, seems to have been misplaced; as demonstrated in the LRB clip below.
Rosemary Hill very nicely contextualizes the tentative nearing of the upper classes and the masses – by way of the pesky upper-middle-classes dabbling about in things called ‘jobs’! – at the beginnings of the last century. One may quibble, but there is much for the discerning viewer to take from the oft maligned Downton Abbey.
On the right is the puzzled question out of Staffordshire in Notes and Queries to which the convoluted reply is included in the video. (From the Internet Archive.)
Annie’s story …
One could I suppose wonder whether there comes a point where all the small and greater stories of any one life have been told – memories revisited and retold, enough secrets divulged. Should such a point of saturation exist (a hypothetical I may well argue against), it seems that, in the case of Annie Ernaux, it has not yet been reached.
Corresponding with an excellent magazine piece (subscription) by Rachel Cusk in The New York Times last weekend, I had coincidentally borrowed two slight – very slight – installments in that aforesaid life; both published in translation only quite recently in Germany.
In Das andere Mädchen (L’autre fille, NiL Éditions, 2011), Ernaux gives life to the no-memory-of a sister she didn’t have; for the death from diphtheria of she named Ginette predated her own birth. Written (mostly) in a mini Briefroman form addressed to this at first unknown sister – and always aware of the irrationality of this exercise – that no-memory becomes essential to her real memories: of discovering as a ten year old, and only through chance, of Ginette’s existence, and the realization that Ginette’s death is for Annie existential (her parents only intended to have one child); of her parents who never spoke of their loss; of their fear of losing another; of their expectations for Annie, the replacement. It is almost as if her whole childhood was lived in the haunting shadow of another.
L’autre fille (only sixty or so pages) has not been translated into English. (Perhaps due in this instance to the smaller French publishing house rather than Gallimard?) A translation note unto myself: Given that the book builds on that overheard conversation which ends with Annie’s mother stating that Ginette was “viel lieber als die da”, that is, “much more lovable/better/preferable as [Annie]”. I can only say: good luck with that one!
Did I say: slight, very slight? Now, Der Junge Mann, is really very slight – about thirty pages, each formatted, shall we say, ‘opposite of condensed’. In the French original, Le jeune homme, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, this life fragment (you see I am grappling with what terminology to apply to these Ernaux-esque episodes!) was written in the last year of the last millennium and revolves about Annie Ernaux’s relationship with a thirty year younger student called only A. – Ernaux was in her mid-fifties – that has presumably not long ended. (Here, at UK Vogue – surprisingly! – is an excerpt.)
The age difference matters – not only in the public space (no, the French are not immune to the dictates of societal norms) but also in their private interactions; to paraphrase: i would like you to have my baby, he says at one point … well, that is just not going to happen, her obvious reply. (Though, she who had two children in her twenties and had never contemplated anymore, did find herself idly wondering what, with all the new technology and stuff, that would be like!) And age is often a determinate of the power balance. In this relationship, had the age difference been the other way round, the young man (then no longer young – even for a bloke !) would have had more options in which to exercise power (and at the same time without eliciting the glares of disapproval afforded an older woma), but against the norm here it is clear that Annie is control. She instigated this thing and she will end it.
The question remains: was this for Ernaux simply an arrangement of convenience (for her )? One that fulfilled not only her physical needs – for sexual intimacy and the rituals and familiarity of a partnership – but, importantly, her intellectual needs as a writer whose sharpest tool was that of memory? In that respect A. offered a convenient conduit to her past. He was from a similar working class provincial milieu (she says that, but Ernaux’s experience, born in 1940 and growing up in the immediate decades after, surely were substantially different to a young man born, say, in 1970?); as she did, he, too, is studying in Rouen with the minimum of resources and an uncertain future. Observing him at a place she once was, had a way of stimulating feelings and emotions that she had thought long left behind. The most startling of these the abortion that she had as a student, and in the hospital to be seen from A.’s window. The book ends with the end of the relationship and Annie having written down the trauma of that experience, published the next year in France as L’événement and written about by me in this post.
These works continue Annie Ernaux’s excavation of her person and her past; with each shifting the perspective of the story we thought we knew that came before. I would be surprised if they were to be the last.
English translations of Ernaux’s work are available through Seven Stories in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the U.K.
May 14 2023: Some days later, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, I have found myself making a connection between Annie’s story about her sister (in L’autre fille) and that other which told about her abortion as a young woman (inspired during the time frame covered in Le jeune homme and explicitly written about in L’événement). Both of these forms of absence, have, it seems to me, moved Ernaux to reflect upon what is left behind in the gaps of unrealized, or not wholly so, lives. I have often talked about Ernaux’s writing of her own life, but perhaps, here, the imperative was to write and memorialize two ‘lives’ that were, to various degrees fleeting, but, nevertheless, profoundly influenced the course of her life.
What’s in a name
With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!
Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.
I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.
Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.
Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.
And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.
A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.
With baton in hand: On Tár & Ethel Smyth
Tár has been on my mind. A Todd Field film released at the end of last year; much talked about, though receipts suggest not seen nearly as much – albeit more so of late (award season!) and much more so since its wider release outside of the US. And looked upon mostly favorably and sometimes not. For now I can only add that it says much about these fractious times that a film about an absolutely not-nice but lauded female conductor – that all agree is brilliantly portrayed be Cate Blanchett – could be hauled from the creative space of the movie theater and plunged into the vitriolic and intransigent arena of the culture-war theater. I will see it and then have my say. (Though be warned my impartiality is not assured: most anything with Blanchett – with the exception of Armani ads! – is okay by me. I like to think we sound alike.) And have been encouraged to do so by a just read piece by Nicholas Spice in the LRB (Vol. 45 No. 6 · 16 March 2023) that broadly considers the art of conducting through Field’s film, a recent translation and commentary of Richard Wagner’s essays “On Conducting” (amazingly open access at JSTOR) and an experiential memoir by Alice Farnham.
There is probably no reason Spice should mention Ethel Smyth in his essay, but I would not have minded her spirited and stubborn presence; for she, too, has been fluttering around in my head. In the midst of my continuing Virginia Woolf stuff, I have been occupied with that period at the beginning of the 1930s during which Woolf found herself the object of the affections of the celebrated composer, conductor and suffragette; the attentions of whom aroused and irritated at the same time.
At the beginning of 1931 Woolf attended rehearsals of Smyth’s opera The Prison, adapted from a poem by her friend Henry B. Brewster, and then its London premiere performance on February 24. All did not go well. Accordingly, a very belated first recording in 2020 and its warm reception is of interest, and to be complemented by this essay, also from The Guardian, by Leah Broad.
Mysterious is this friend of hers, Henry Bennet Brewster, about whom information (in the internet anyway) seems scarce* but, when unearthed, is often in respect to his relationship with Smyth; his own work, seemingly, to have fallen into obscurity. Of any substance I can only find this 1962 essay by Martin Halpern in American Quarterly (pub. The John Hopkins University Press) held at JSTOR. (*Halpern’s essay suggests more could be learned by way of others, like another even more famous friend – Henry James. A task for another time. But the rediscovery of Brewster that Halpern hoped for sixty odd years ago seems not to have eventuated – unlike that of Smyth. Unless of course she has coattails to match her tailcoats!)
The Prison can be sampled below on Spotify; other interpretations of her work can also be heard there (with an account) including Mass in D from the BBC Symphony Orchestra; also resurrected and recorded for the first time in 2019.
In a diary entry made following the 1931 rehearsal of The Prison, Woolf writes a colorful -and comical – portrait of Ethel Smyth, which concludes with her being struck that Smyth, so practical and so strident in common discourse, could spin such music – so coherent, so harmonious – and asks the question: “What if she should be a great composer?” Well, that I cannot answer. But, what can be said, is that Dame Ethel Smyth has been granted that rare gift of an afterlife; enough qualified others over the years having concluded her music had merit and warranted reappraisal – and, this, long after her once radical presence in this mortal world had seemingly been confined to feminist folklore, footnotes – or even the diary and letters of Virginia Woolf.
Cold comfort
Chilly – if it were not so warm – is the latest so-called Synthesis Report just presented by the IPCC and soon to be published in full.
Simply stated; the 1.5C limit presumed to be the maximum global temperature increase beyond which damage to the earth’s environment would be irreversible is more than in jeopardy – probably unattainable. That’s the pessimistic reading, and perhaps the only reading.
The Guardian this morning reports and offers some clear analysis. Optimistic is it not.
Direct links below to PDFs of the press release and summary; it is said that the full report – a hefty affair, that few would seriously read I would say – will be available soon.
International Booker
Further to my previous post, it is pleasing to note that Leïla Slimani will chair this year’s International Booker Prize, awarded to a work of translated fiction. And am just as pleased that amongst others she will be joined on the judging panel by Parul Sehgal, who I often read when she was at The New York Times and that I see now is a writer and critic at the New Yorker.
The longlist will be announced on 14th March, the shortlist of six books on 18th April and the winning title at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, 23rd May, 2023.