I came across a podcast featuring this quote after watching the famous adaptation of one of the novels of Margaret Forster, Georgy Girl, last week. I had known nothing about the author, so I was surprised to find out not only that she had written so much, but that a considerable body of her work consisted of biographies.
As co-author (with my friend Rob Polner) of a biography myself (An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer), I identified completely with Ms. Forster’s anxiety about bringing a biography to the level she desired.
And I also could relate to a dilemma she mentioned in her interview with Sue Lawley: the fear of a discovery late in the project that could significantly alter or even delay publication. This occurred with Ms. Forster when working on her acclaimed, path-breaking biography of Rebecca novelist Daphne du Maurier.
While astonishingly prolific (25 novels and 14 works of nonfiction), Ms. Forster remains far better known in her native Britain than in the U.S. (In my local county library system, for instance, I could find only eight of her works.) But she sounds like an author whose works invite reading and whose dedication encourages imitation.
(For a warm and
affectionate appreciation of the very private Ms. Forster, see Kathleen Jones’s 2016 post on her “A Writer’s Life” blog.)
If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, Regeneration (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road), you really owe it to yourself to see what wonders she can bring to historical fiction.
I have not yet read a later trilogy of hers, The Women of Troy, but I have to think that it must be very good, too. And a key part of her success has to be how she brings her characters to life in dialogue, as she describes above.
(The image accompanying
this post, of Pat Barker at the Durham Book Festival in 2012, was taken October
27, 2012, by summonedbyfells.)
The 125th birthday of Noel Coward
passed almost two weeks ago, but I couldn’t allow 2024 to go by without noting
the worldwide observance of the event.
The image of Coward that has come down to posterity—in dinner jacket, with slicked-back hair and cigarette in hand (kind of like what you see with this post)—obscures a polymath of ferocious energy and dedication who shames the rest of us by comparison.
Even more than the bon vivant of legend, it is this artist who scoffed at notions about his genius but gladly accepted compliments about his professionalism, that I celebrate with this post.
One last thing, though: You’ll notice in the above quote
that Coward refers not to “acting” in general but to “stage acting” in
particular. The latter certainly offers the possibility of an electricity between
audience and performer that is not possible on film.
But film acting, in contrast, certainly “lives in
people's memories as long as they live.” Coward himself is a good example.
Modern audiences will have no idea how he appeared
onstage in 1933 with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in his comedy Design for
Living. But as long as a TV station or movie revival house exists, viewers
can watch him 18 times on film, from his 1935 screen debut in The
Scoundrel to his 1969 swan song, The Italian Job.
Those roles, as fleeting or even imperfect as they could
sometimes be, show why so many people of his time—and even ours—remain “mad
about the boy.”
Longtime readers of this blog know that I have
frequently quoted from this Victorian frequently over the years—even though,
unlike most other writers featured here, I discovered her on my own, well after
my formal education ended.
When I did, I was astonished to discover that her Complete Poems—over 1,100, with approximately 900 published in her lifetime—ran to
a hefty 1,300 pages.
As I considered her work and her life, I was struck by several similarities with Emily Dickinson.
Even the most seemingly significant difference between the two might not be as substantial as it seems at first: Although Rossetti’s religious orientation was Anglo-Catholic while Dickinson rejected the Calvinism of her New England ancestors, both pondered in their work, for want of a better term, the ultimate—i.e., the presence (or lack of it) of God, the possibility of a hereafter.
It turns out that I am hardly the only reader who has
drawn parallels between the two poets. Others have pointed out these similarities:
*Each was born in December 1830;
*Each developed a reputation as a spinster/recluse;
*Each, when meeting others, did so within their homes,
usually facilitated by their charismatic older brother;
*Each devoted much of their work in their home to
looking after their fathers;
*Each’s sexuality—or suppression of it—has fanned intense
scholarly interest, despite the lack of much documentation to justify many
conclusions;
*Each seems to have suffered from a mysterious ailment
or set of them, which has also produced a small cottage industry of studies;
*Each wrote poetry in a deceptively simple style that
cloaks complicated reflections on resignation, loss, and mortality.
The youngest child of Italian immigrants to Great
Britain, Christina came from one of the most artistically accomplished families
of her era. Her father was a poet and Dante scholar; sister Maria, books on
Dante, religious instruction, and Italian grammar and translation; brother
William, art and literary criticism; and brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the
foremost poets and painters of his time, as a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
In her youth, Christina could beat her siblings in rapidly
dashing off exquisite poems, and her striking looks—particularly the pale
complexion, large eyes, and long uncurled hair (as seen in the attached image, created by her brother Dante)—made her one of the initial go-to
models of the Pre-Raphaelites.
But in her mid-teens, she suffered a collapse in
health. Over time, as she became more intensely devotional, she spurned at
least two suitors who did not meet the spiritual standard she desired for a
husband.
Much of her poetry inextricably intertwines Biblical
imagery with her own spontaneous melodic voice—a style that reached a peak of
sorts with the famous hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” In art as in life, she
was confessional and self-abasing to a fault.
But she was valued so much by contemporaries that she
was a serious contender for the post of British poet laureate after the death
of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (Her rapidly declining health at this point closed off
any chance of achieving that distinction.)
Understandably, considering that “the Moor of Venice”
is the only black character in all of William Shakespeare’s 38 plays,
current dramaturgy tries to examine how the playwright speaks to the racism of
our time. It has, as part of that process, thrown into question the common
practice of actors donning blackface for the role.
But the tragedy should also be subjected to literary
excavation to determine how the play was written, performed, and viewed in its
own time—an era of danger and secrets.
Shakespeare had learned his lesson well while crafting plays under the watchful eye of James’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: searingly depict the society and psyches of courts swirling with intrigue, but set the action far away, lest listeners find the plots and characters striking too close to home.
(And Renaissance Venice was much farther away in time if not
distance from England than we can ever imagine today: storms in the English
Channel were known to delay passage to France for as much as two weeks.)
Clare Asquith’s 2005 study, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, with its
contention that the playwright was a secret Catholic when the faith was banned
in England, has hardly been universally accepted by Bardologists. But she draws
some interesting parallels between Othello and James, including that both
leaders:
*survived narrow escapes;
*professed that their wives offered life-saving love;
*came to their new status as foreigners (James had
been James VI of Scotland before assuming the English throne, while Othello,
“the Moor of Venice,” would have been understood by audiences of the time as
being from modern North Africa);
*celebrated Venice’s preservation from Moslem invaders
(James, in his poetry; Othello, in battle).
For all the coding and deflection that Shakespeare,
like other literary figures of the time, resorted to throughout his work, he
was also sending “an urgent message” to James in this new play: “Royal
authority must not fall into the hands of base men like Angelo [the Me-Too-like
abuser of Measure for Measure] and Iago; it must be exercised responsibly.”
Starting in 1600, Shakespeare wrote what are often
considered his four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and
Othello. Of these, the last is the most tightly constructed in character
(three main ones: Othello, Desdemona, and Iona) and time.
The time element may be the most important, as Iago,
with an energy to match his cunning, sets in motion with stunning speed the
plot that will destroy the life, reputation, and happiness of his commander.
Two days after Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus with mutual ardor, they
are dead.
Commercial, overcivilized, seething with intrigue,
Venice provides a ripe environment in which Iago can plant the seeds of the
downfall of his plain-dealing commander. But such is his sense of invention
that even a military outpost like Cyprus, more congenial to Othello, furthers
his nefarious purposes: this time, the innocent Desdemona is utterly at sea.
The Venetian republic had depended on foreigners to
defend itself from Moslem attacks, as seen in the play by service personnel
from Spain (Iago—interestingly enough, Spanish for “James”) and Othello (from
North Africa). Even so, the court of King James and throngs who saw the play at
both the open-air Globe playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars in the next couple
of decades would have known that its possession Cyprus had eventually fallen to
the Ottoman Empire.
Venice could ill afford, then, to lose the likes of
great commanders like Othello, and their absence from future councils of war
could only increase the vulnerability of the republic.
Even in this point of geographic deflection,
Shakespeare was hinting to his audience that the personal could become the
political very quickly.
In the case of the English monarch, listeners had a
strong reason to think so: a monarch’s inability to produce a male heir had
pushed the nation into the cohort of Protestant European nations under King
Henry VIII, then had hastened the transition from his childless (Tudor)
daughter Elizabeth to James (Stuart).
Literary and theatrical culture supplied Shakespeare’s
plot. His major source was an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli
Hecatommithi, translated into French (where, presumably, the playwright saw
a translation).
Cinthio's “ensign” brings about the fall of his chief
in this tale, too. But the lesson is decidedly different from what Shakespeare
conveyed: children should obey their parents, even if—especially if—
this means the bride should not marry a black male without their permission.
Shakespeare also drew on a tradition better known to
English theatergoers: morality plays that were popular in his teens. As
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World,
these productions had fallen out of favor by the time the playwright reached
his creative zenith late in the Elizabethan era, but they had concentrated
viewers’ attention on a representative figure of evil, often named Vice.
In Othello, the sin—jealousy—becomes the tragic
flaw that Othello, so used to commanding men in battle, finds impossible to
quell within his heart, with Iago serving as the supercharged symbol of evil.
I have seen several productions of Othello onstage or
onscreen, featuring such compelling actors as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier,
James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Ron O’Neal. This has continued the
tradition that began with Shakespeare’s leading player, Richard Burbage,
playing the role before King James.
But Jones’ 1982 Broadway hit crystallized one of the common dilemmas of the play: No matter how magnetic the star playing Othello might be, the spotlight, more often than not, swings to the actor embodying Iago.
Ecstatic reviews for that show’s Iago, Christopher Plummer, considerably
annoyed Jones (and, let’s face it, brought out a jealous streak not unlike his
character), who was already perturbed by his co-star’s penchant for hamming up
scenes with crowd-pleasing humor, according to Plummer's memoir In Spite of Myself.
But this tendency of Iago consuming greater viewer
attention is also grounded in the play itself:
*Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies such as King
Lear, evil is massed in one character rather than dispersed across multiple
ones;
*Iago not only has more lines than Othello, but also,
because he appears before he comes onstage, has the opportunity to set
expectations about their relationship;
*Iago’s soliloquys render the audience complicit in
his plotting;
*Iago neither makes amends for nor adequately explains
his actions—indeed, he offers so many, with so little real justification, that
he appears to be grasping at straws to fill what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
memorably called the villain’s “motiveless malignity.”
The great essayist William Hazlitt, in his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, aptly summarizes Iago as possessing a "diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter."
(The image accompanying this post shows a particularly
celebrated influential production of Othello, from 1930 at London’s Savoy
Theatre, with Paul Robeson as the title character and Peggy Ashcroft as
Desdemona.)
(Photograph
of Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde.)
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was published. It was a notable success that enabled him to marry Emma Gifford, and to give up architecture so he could concentrate on writing.
The novel also marked a turning point in his subject matter and setting, as he first used the name “Wessex” to represent an imaginary region of south and southwest England.
The heroine of the novel,
Bathsheba Everdene, was played by Julie Christie (pictured here) in the 1967
film adaptation by John Schlesinger.
"Better be despised
for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security."—Anglo-Irish
statesman and conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
The image accompanying
this post shows Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland in the 1942 film adaptation
of Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, In This Our Life—a
title taken, as seen in the passage above, from this George Meredith poem.
The image accompanying
this post shows Frances O’Connor as Fanny Price, the character who says the
above words, in the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.
That comment from Dr. Johnson should be borne in mind
when we try to calculate the losses incurred by the widespread isolation in the
days after the COVID-19 outbreak.
The image accompanying this post shows Greer Garson in
her Oscar-winning title role in the 1942 film adaptation of Mrs. Miniver.
