It’s been a while since I addressed my odd High WASP culture. Those of you old-timers who find the theme annoying, please (as Faux Fuchsia would say), Look Away Now™.

Those of you new to the blog, I ask your forbearance. This is a complicated topic*.  We’re throwing in a book and a movie review for good measure.

This weekend I finally caught up with I Am Love, Tilda Swinton’s movie about an Italian “haute bourgeoise” family. Coincidentally, and recently, I happened also to have read Maggie Shipstead’s book, Seating Arrangements.

Both sent me into tiny rages.

I Am Love tells the story of a Russian woman, married for something like 25 years to the patriarch of a wealthy Italian family. The term bourgeois applies because the money comes from textiles, not land or title. A distinction we don’t make here in America. Never mind.

So the lovely Russian, known now as Emma, leaves her husband, family and beautiful house for a young chef. She and her lover cook, make love in fields, and for some reason wind up dirty and entwined in a cave. I’m still shaking my head over that part. Along the way, loved ones die, tables are set, glorious Jil Sander clothes get worn. A tragic melodrama, I’ll call it.

Pearls, those harbingers of doom.

Seating Arrangements, on the other hand, is more of a melodramatic comedy. No denying, it’s entertaining.

Did you know that comedies often end in weddings or dances? Yes. Yes they do. This one tells the story of a New England High WASP family wedding. The patriarch, Richard, serves as protagonist. Ineffectual, alienated, foolish; protagonist nonetheless. I was so mad by the time I reached the end of the book that my memory of the plot is foggy, but I do recall that Richard falls off a roof when attempting to steal the weathervane from his more successful rival’s new house.

And there you have the primary stereotypes of privileged European-derived families, one, two, and done. Repressed and dominated woman, alienated anxious man. Bah humbug. Updike and Cheever wrote this guy to pieces. Richard Ford does a far better job with the species, albeit one conceptual town over. To say nothing of Edith Wharton and Age of Innocence. Ibsen and Flaubert imagined Hedda Gabler and Emma Bovary (get it? Emma?), ages ago. It’s been mapped, people, it’s been done to death.

I understand that some privileged families will be very similar to those portrayed in these two vehicles. I get that. What bothers me is that it’s the same picture all the time, and each time we’re supposed to experience the narrative as new and revelatory. I don’t mind that Swinton and Shipstead got it wrong for some, but that they imply it’s correct for all, otherwise known as stereotyping.

I’m angry because it’s wrong to use cultural stereotypes inauthentically in art, as symbols. Especially in melodramas. Only irony illuminates stereotypes.

And I’ve got a dog in this hunt. Look, in my own family, we’ve got men who feel anxiety. They are not figures of fun. We’ve got women who leave. They don’t wind up in fields, with bugs. If you really want to understand this culture in America, read Cheerful Money, Tad Friend’s family history. Just because England is your prison, doesn’t mean Italy sets you free.

Art is supposed to have a valuable relationship with truth.

I understand that my reaction is highly personal. Too personal, probably. Had this been about an Asian family, I could simply have enjoyed the pageantry and the comedy or tragedy of manners. Narratives of the privileged set a stage for fashion and design. Money makes for impeccable surfaces. But it feels dreadful when your own details are used as commodity symbols.

By the way, while Shipstead captures a New England island party, I Am Love misses, here and there.

For example, at one point Emma steals a book. We’re supposed to see she’s overwhelmed by desire, but really? She’d have realized the crime, just before she gets into the truck to go cook with Antonio. Neither shrimp nor a bare-chested bearded man would make her break the code. Another example. At the climactic deathbed? No one comforts the bereaved wife. Very, very rude. In extremis we rely even more on decorum.

Most erroneously, when Emma leaves, she walks out with nothing. In real life, she’d take the jewelry. She would. She knows the value or she’d have left long ago.

Finally, I do understand that coming from privilege, my feelings count as what we call First World Problems. That’s the thing about privilege, at least what I hope is intelligent privilege, you know you have to suck it up from the git go. You understand, early on, that others stand before you in the injustice line.

But I have to ask, does privilege waive one’s right to protest stereotyping? Or, are the privileged fair game? It’s a serious question, one to which I do not know the answer. Maybe all American jokes in the future will begin, “Two High WASPs walk into a bar…”

*”What is a ‘High WASP,’” you may ask. A term I use to mean someone who fulfills the WASP acronym, but also comes from a family that made an American fortune. Often the term ‘WASP,’ alone is used to refer to this smaller sub-group; I aim for precision. Note that Pete Campbell’s father-in-law call him a “High WASP,” on Mad Men. We do not use the word “high” here to indicate virtue, only circumstances. For more, here’s my About page, and here’s the search on prior posts. I have to promise you I am not too big of a big jerk, and hope that I’ve done a better job here at the nuances than in this January post.

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Occasionally I receive offers of book sample copies, with requests to review. As you can tell, I don’t respond terribly often. But this book, Black Chokeberry, by Martha Nelson, seemed apropos to our discussions.

It’s the story of three not-young women, and what transpires when one of them moves home to the small town of Oswego, New York.

Frances, the oldest of the three, is widowed. Ruby has never married. Ellen, who moves home, does so after a long marriage ends in divorce. So this is not a story about midlife women and men. Nor is it a story, by the way, about women out conquering the world. Let’s all note that we do know women over 50 often have a life of both men and jobs. But this is not that story. And I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

Fairly early in the novel, one of the women is injured in an accident. They all wind up moving in together. A dog is involved. That’s pretty much it -  at least it’s pretty much the plot.

Because this is one of those books with more to it. Black Chokeberry is to the mysteries of single women over 50 as Lena Dunham’s “Girls” is to the secret life of 20-somethings. It’s a very closely observed, very small world, one which provokes some discomfort. This, from Ellen.

It all changed when she hit her fiftieth birthday. Deeply affected by the hard reality that she was in the final phase of her life, with only thirty more years of living if she were really lucky, Ellen had made a scared pledge to herself on that milestone birthday: only the best undersewar and beautifully made soft T-shirts from now on….

Sitting now on the edge of the bed in her tiny Oswego house, she reached into the nightstand for a Twix bar, unwrapped it quickly, snapped the twin bars in half, and popped one into her mouth, not caring that she had just brushed her teeth.

Such a small detail, the toothpaste. Such an indicator of personal distress, and one that made me uncomfortable. I welcome discomfort in art. The book is full of those small details that rarely make it into fiction, the embarrassing personal habits we develop when living alone, the anxieties, the quirks.

It’s also full of grace – of the sort that develops when people take care of each other.

I didn’t like everything, mind you. Too many brand names, for one. I prefer my literature remain in a non-pop-culture land, one which although it may reference a date, floats in fictional time. And the metaphor behind the book’s title is horribly overt. It’s so easy to use gardens as a crutch to meaning. Let’s leave that to Voltaire, shall we? But really, it’s an oddly Gothic little novel, which scratches along the sandy bottom of character and place very well, and keeps one good company, in all kinds of places.

For those of you with dreams of fiction – which I can’t write to save my life – it’s worth noting that Ms. Nelson has gray hair. That this is her first novel, and she is married with two dogs and a cat. All sorts of worlds are worth a close analysis.

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Here’s mine.

I’ve observed a growing use of the word “creative” as a noun. Where people who write or work with images for a living call themselves, “Creatives.” Drives me nuts. I suppose I’m not alone.  The term began in advertising, apparently, but is expanding.

You see, as I pace up and down the cubicle pathways of our offices, or speak to people in conference rooms, I rely on the same mental snatch and grab of disparate elements I know from writing, or playing with photographs. Not to mention that odd Hail Mary to the brain’s nether regions. Perhaps there’s a little more testosterone involved, certainly a lot more talking. But still. It’s not fair for one professional faction to abscond with the good parts of everyone else’s job.

As it happens, I’ve also been reading a young adult series, The Divergent Trilogy, in which the imagined dystopian society has divided itself into castes, predicated on temperament. From the Amazon book description.

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent).

By taking this idea to its extreme, i.e. that any one group can claim and hoard the core attributes of humankind at large, we expose the fallacies. Perhaps we could invent the term dilatio ad absurdum, but I got a C in my 8:30am P/F college Latin class, so probably not. The books, on the other hand are good reads. Highly recommended for entertainment value. Because I’ve got to give you something useful in return for your tolerance of this rant.

In sum, and with all due respect, I want my adjective back. Thank you, and have a lovely, and creative, weekend.

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Books, of course, aren’t just their content. They are projects reflective of the drive we have to matter. Here Sal talks about why she self-published. As in all of the best endeavors, her personal agenda lines up very nicely with the goals she has in serving her readers.

“When we dress to show respect for ourselves, people around us cannot help but sense our confidence. If you want others to respect you, you must respect yourself first. And show it.” Sally McGraw, Already Pretty

And some more from Sal, who is honoring us with a guest post today.

All is Vanity

I received a degree in creative writing in 1998. Back then, self-publishing was referred to as “vanity publishing” and considered to be laughable, illegitimate, downright shameful. I entered the job force believing that the only way to become a writer was to convince the cadre of already-employed writers and editors that you were up to snuff. And I did, and I nabbed a few freelance gigs here and there, and eventually became so frustrated with the insulting pay and rigged power system that I abandoned my love of writing to learn design, marketing, and project management.

In 2007, a friend suggested I launch a blog, and I did. It grew slowly which made the process all the more fascinating and rewarding for me. I still had some lingering feelings of illegitimacy since I wrote and published to my own website without ever soliciting the blessing of an editor, but I pushed that aside when I saw how rewarding it could be to write passionately and reach people immediately.

In 2010 I created a book proposal, secured a literary agent in New York, and worked with her for a solid year. She must’ve consulted with 20 or more publishers, all of whom said some version of the following: The book is well-written and original, Sally is terrific, and we’re not going to publish it because she’s not Tim Gunn and it’s too much of a financial risk. When I first contracted with my agent, I was convinced that the validation of a traditional publishing contract was essential. After a year of being told that my inability to sell tens of thousands of copies to total strangers was preventing me from making my book a reality, I decided I would damned well do it all myself. My readers had been requesting a book for years. I knew that SOME of them would be excited if I created and released one.

So I worked with a wonderfully diverse group of fellow bloggers to secure photos of their outfits, and designed my book according to my longstanding vision. And maybe I’ll sell 50 copies to my friends and family and then the book will disappear forever. But it feels fantastic to have followed this project to completion, despite being pooh-poohed by the struggling traditional publishing industry.

Writing has changed, publishing has changed, career paths related to writing and publishing are changing. I’m sure that many people will read my story and still see vanity publishing. I get that. Maybe it is vain to have been told by experts that you’re not good enough, and to plow ahead regardless. Or maybe it makes sense to utilize these new tools for creating and distributing creative work to reach whomever you can, instead of trying to reach absolutely everyone.

Buy Sal’s book here, or here if you’re in Europe. It’s worth it. And, since it involves what can feel like a big project, she’s building a forum so you can go build attractive together.

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David Lean’s Passage to India (1984) opens with umbrellas moving past an office window where there’s a picture of a P&O ship. Raising her umbrella to see the ship is Adela Quested, about to book passage for India, there to visit Ronny Heaslop and find out if she really wants to marry him – and marry India.

The umbrellas and the rain capture much of what’s English about England. British imperialism, in its least imperial aspect, was a flight to the sun. Countless English and Scots went “out” to India or Arabia or Ethiopia or East Africa or Egypt. On the first day of a trip I took to Egypt, mostly with English travelers, I remember a nice English woman exclaiming, as she emerged from her room into the Egyptian sunlight, about the miserable winter she had just left behind. I think the romance of the sun made a fair part of what sent Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell and Wilfred Thesiger and so many others off on their quests.

Early in Forster’s novel is a hymn to the sun’s generative power: “when the sky chooses, glory can rain” – not English “rain” – “into the Chandrapore bazaars or a benediction pass from horizon to horizon. The sky can do this because it is so strong and so enormous. Strength comes from the sun…” Who would want to spend a winter in England if something warmer and dryer could reasonably be found? But sometimes we bring the rain with us: in the film, after Adela has recanted her accusations against Dr. Aziz and he has been set free, his English friend Fielding stands in pouring rain while Aziz rushes off to a party celebrating his release. When the film ends, the rain is falling outside Adela’s London window while she reads Aziz’s letter of forgiveness and atonement. The final shot shows her face, framed by lace curtains, looking out the window streaked with raindrops, as though they were tears.

Lean’s film was a big success. Vincent Canby liked it –“intimate, funny and moving” – save for the musical score. Roger Ebert called it “one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.” It did very well at the Oscars (eleven nominations, including best picture) and Golden Globes (five nominations). As Mrs. Moore, Ronny Heaslop’s mother, the wonderful Peggy Ashcroft was everybody’s best supporting actress. As Adela, the equally wonderful Judy Davis was nominated for best actress by the Academy. Lean was nominated as best director and for best screenplay by the Golden Globes. The musical score that Canby disliked so much – it has “nothing to do with Forster, India, the time or the story” – took both awards as “best original score.” The Amazon reviewers of the DVD are almost all of them impressed: “magnificent and exquisite wrought”; “must see”; “a gem”.

But colonial spectacles on the big screen are risky business. An Indian reviewer on Amazon proves it. “I am an Indian,” he wrote, “I adore the way Forster wrote about India,” but the film is another story. Lean has fallen “for the standard shrinkwrapped clichés about India that any western director indulges in.” The casting is awful: “an atrocious Alec Guinness trying to pass off as a Brahmin Professor,” and Victor Banerjee, “absurdly over-eager,” who “struts about” as Aziz. The whole thing is “borderline idiotic.” Having criticized film adaptations of Wharton’s House of Mirth and Ethan Frome for not living up to their great originals, I’m inclined to take an insider seriously (assuming that being Indian makes the critic an insider). Why is the difference in aesthetic judgments so pronounced?

The casting, in one instance, is certainly a problem. It’s not just political correctness to think Alec Guinness makes an odd Professor Godbole (pronounced God-bo-lee, I learned from the film, which I suppose is right, though I’ve always thought it was God-bole). Guinness’s Godbole comes close to caricature. And maybe Lean realized this too late. It’s said their relationship deteriorated during the filming and that Guinness was unhappy when he learned how much of his part had ended up on the cutting room floor But Victor Bannerjee, born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), was almost perfect as Aziz to my eyes. Certainly he didn’t “strut.” If anything he cringed, like the obsequious Indian of the western imagination. Perhaps that was a problem for an Indian viewer. Or was it that Banerjee, an upper class Bengali, wasn’t the right choice to play the Muslim Aziz? I’ve never been to India. I know it’s a hard place to understand.

If I were Indian, I might think India had been slighted in the film. It begins in England, it ends in England. It begins with Adela Quested, it ends with her. Forster novel begins and ends in India. In the film, we see Adela booking passage. In the novel, there’s no “passage” in the usual sense, we’re already there. The “passage” of the novel is that of mind flying across space and time. Forster’s remarkable first sentence sets the stage: “Except for the Marabar caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.” Instead of English umbrellas and shop windows, we start with a panoramic view that narrows slowly to sights of the city itself, as if in some aerial shot of Google earth, a city where all is “abased,” monotonous,” a “low but indestructible form of life.” Nothing extraordinary except the Marabar caves, a surpassing exception. This is the last we hear of the caves until Aziz, having made the polite mistake of suggesting the English ladies visit him, proposes the fatal outing to the caves in order to spare himself the embarrassment of entertaining at his bungalow. Aziz has never seen them himself, but Professor Godbole has. Aziz tries to stir up Adela’s interest: no doubt the caves are “‘immensely holy?” “ ‘ Oh no, oh no,’ ” says Godbole. Are they ornamented? “ ‘Oh no.’” Then maybe the famous caves are an “ ‘empty brag’”? “’No, I should not quite say that,” says Godbole. Then “describe them to this lady,’” says Aziz. “ ‘It will be a great pleasure,’” says Godbole. But “he forewent the pleasure.” The famous caves are ineffable, beyond describing – even though the novel describes them: “A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is a Marabar cave.”

The film’s ending differs even more than its beginning from Forster’s. Fielding and his pregnant wife Stella, Mrs. Moore’s daughter, have been to visit Aziz in his new home in the Himalayas, away from the British. In the film, Fielding and Stella, starting their journey back home, drive off and Aziz watches them go. Then we see Adela at her window in London. The novel ends, instead, with a memorable scene between Fielding and Aziz. They go riding together. Fielding confides to Aziz that he and Stella do not get on very well. But she is pregnant, perhaps things between them will improve. Fielding and Aziz ride on. They talk about England and India, joking and fighting all at once. Aziz gives a mock-heroic cheer, like a schoolboy at a football match, for the new India to come: “ ‘India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one. Hurrah! Hurrah for India!’” Fielding mocks him: India will “ ‘rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps.’” Aziz answers: “ ‘we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then’” – he rode against him furiously – ‘and then,’ he concluded, half kissing him, ‘you and I shall be friends.’” Why not now, asks Fielding, holding Aziz “affectionately.’” But the horses and the earth and the sky “didn’t want it.” “ ‘Not yet.’”

When I began teaching in 1960, I was assigned, as were all newcomers, to teach a course called “Masterpieces of English Literature.” The choice of texts was up to me, but the course began somewhere near the start of English Lit. and ended somewhere near the end. I assigned Forster. But what did I have to say? Surely something about race, religion and reconciliation – but nothing, I’m equally sure, about what’s happening in that brilliant last scene between Fielding and Aziz. The horseplay, the half kissing, the affection, it was all lost on me. Forster’s homosexuality was not then generally known. His novel Maurice, with its theme of homosexual salvation, was not published until 1971, the year after he died. But I blame only my own naivete for not having understood. Yes I knew homosexuality existed — I wasn’t that naive – but the idea that homoerotic affection, however frustrated, could serve as a metaphor of reconciliation between races and religions, between colonizer and colonized, was beyond my grasp. In a great novel like Passage to India? I wonder how many gay students were in the class and understood better than I. If they did, it was not something in 1960 that would ever, ever have come up in the conversation.

Does this all mean that Lean’s film is as bad as the Indian reviewer on Amazon believed? I don’t think so. Definitely it is paler, notwithstanding all sorts of British-inspired pomp and pageantry. An Indian actor might have been found, someone able to make Godbole, as Forster calls him, a figure of “Ancient Night.” The crucial scene in the caves, when Adela thinks she has been sexually attacked by Aziz, might have been more deeply marked by a sense of its utter strangeness and mystery — except that’s not easy to bring off visually. Above all, perhaps, there might have been more of Forster’s sun and Indian light. Even so, not everything is lost. The film transforms an ineffable drama into a more domestic (and heterosexual) story of character and repressed sexuality that happens to happen on the great Indian stage. It is not a small achievement, though it strays far from the path Forster laid out.

Images:
Elephant, Feet in Pool, The Best Picture Project
Dame Peggy Ashcroft via Flickster
Victor Banerjee as Dr. Aziz, Judy Davis as Adela Quested, IMDb
Dr. Aziz and Adele via Turner Classic Movies.
Judy Davis as Adela Quested via Flickster

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Ethan Frome is as cold as any book I know. I mean bone-chilling. It’s the same world as that of Wallace Stevens’s “Snow Man,” “spruces rough in the distant glitter/ Of the January sun,” an arrangement in black (winter nights) and white (ice and snow). Silver and grey and deep blue are the other colors. Only a crimson ribbon in Mattie’s dark hair, the “gay red” of Zeena’s pickle dish that Mattie unwisely takes off a high shelf to serve Ethan his favorite pickles, the red of Mattie’s blush, a “cold red” sunset, and the flicker of candles and fires light up the darkness. Winter in New England is a season I knew well when I was locked up (no, not literally) in boarding school in New Hampshire. It is harsh but has a subtle beauty, like the late paintings of Mark Rothko or – from another century — the tonalities of “An Arrangement in Grey” (a.k.a. “Whistler’s Mother”). Black and white and grey and silver bear the aura of time and thought. Will the film and its palette (I wonder) do it as well as Ethan Frome?

Ethan Frome is also a study in regional speech. Once I heard the story of an old New England farmer gossiping with a friend of mine, a summer visitor. Their subject was an editor of the local paper by name of Parker Merrill. “You know,” said the old farmer, “that man Paahkah Merrill, he’s so crooked, when he dies you can just screw him into the ground.” It might be a true story, though it’s the sort of thing non-New Englanders and non-Bostonians like to joke about, “paahk the caah in Haahvahd Yaahd.” Wharton has a wonderful ear, and the characters in Ethan Frome speak a rural New England English, in its distinctive rhythms, without parody or condescension.

Nothing is more pervasive than the tag, “I guess,” signifying that not much in life is for certain, or that the speaker knows the true story but doesn’t want to be forthright, or simply “I think.” Zenobia to Ethan, after Mattie’s arrival, “I guess you’re always late, now you shave every morning”; or “I guess I can make out to be home for dinner”; or “I guess it’s about time for supper”; or “I guess I’ll lay down on the bed a little while.” There are many more. Pronunciation and usage are on the mark: “wust” for “worst,” “fust” for first; “ain’t” for “isn’t”; “you’d ought to tell me, Ethan Frome,” for “you should have told me”; “ ‘I’d ‘a had two hours to wait in the station” for “I’d have had to”; you’ll ketch your death”; “it is powerful cold down here”; “this comes handy”; “I feel a little mite better”; and “don’t trouble, Ethan.”

When Zeena discovers that Mattie has used the red pickle dish for Ethan’s meal and the cat has broken it, she lashes out in a voice recalling the rhythms of Biblical vengeance. Isaiah: “Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.” Zenobia: “You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got, and wouldn’t never use it ….You’re a bad girl Mattie Silver, and I’ve always known it. It’s the way your father begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn’t get at ’em – and now you’ve took from me the one I cared for most of all.” This stringing together of connectives (rhetorical handbooks call it “polysyndeton”) is a favorite of preachers calling down the wrath of the gods and is suited to the dark Calvinist stain, perhaps never to be washed away, on the New England mind.

How well (I wonder again) do Liam Neeson and Joan Allen and Patricia Arquette, Ethan, Zenobia, and Mattie in the film, handle New England speech, equally important as the palette, to the life of Wharton’s story? How well, that is, does the director John Madden (he’s English – not the football coach) recreate Wharton’s special effects? Films may or may not choose to replicate their originals, but it’s hard to imagine Ethan Frome being anything except the way it is in Wharton’s telling. Having lived in New England for the better part of twenty winters and with stark memories of the cold – the name of Ethan Frome’s town is Starkfield – I doubt that the film will be able to replicate the essential colors of local landscape and local speech that make Wharton’s story the vivid parable that it is. We’ll see.

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The film opens with a shot of Starkfield looking not at all stark. It is a postcard perfect New England village, complete with mandatory white church and tall steeple. We are in Peacham, Vermont, a town now described on its Website as “full of culture” and “the most photographed town in New England,” a good place for autumn foliage and, in short, about as far from any Starkfield you might imagine. Early in the film, a bar scene puts a few somewhat scruffy-looking locals on display, as if taken from the cast of “Northern Exposure,” but the mood of the town is largely benign, its inhabitants stern-looking but good-natured New Englanders. The ramshackle cottage of the Fromes is far from town, an outlying image of despair, not a symptom of general decay. Vincent Canby, then film critic of the New York Times, said in his review: “Anyone watching this movie will want to check out the availability of the local bed-and-breakfasts.” A good film of the past season was “Winter’s Bone,” a grim vignette of life in the Ozarks. It gets right what the film “Ethan Frome” gets wrong.

Soon after we see Starkfield for the first time, the prissy new preacher from Boston, who replaces Wharton’s visiting engineer as protagonist of the frame narrative, announces to a local gathering: “… the poverty… you would not believe your eyes in Boston… that we could allow such degradation…” He is speaking of the Irish in Boston, but in context, we wonder at first if he means Starkfield. It is oddly ambiguous. In any case, he sounds like an affluent American who’s been visiting an African village. Starkfield in the film is an enclave of sober citizens who might be appalled by Irish or African poverty. In the novel, life in Starkfield more resembles that of Irish degradation.

The story of Ethan’s frustrated education is as different in film and novel as the two Starkfields. Wharton: “Four or five years earlier he had taken a year’s course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics…His father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies.” A technological college in Worcester isn’t an improbable fact of Ethan’s past (though I’m not sure what a physics professor does in a lab). In the film, one of the village elders asks at a gathering after the burial of Ethan’s mother: “What were you studying at Harvard, Ethan?” He answers: “Engineering,” adding that he didn’t get far but that “everybody” says he had a feel for it.

That a farm boy would have gone to Harvard from an impoverished New England town, whose inhabitants (we learn from another scene) have never been to Boston, is unlikely. That he would have studied “engineering” is equally improbable, and perhaps impossible. The Harvard curriculum was in flux in the late nineteenth century — but “engineering”? I don’t think that Ethan Frome or anybody else could have studied much engineering at Harvard. As Peacham, Vermont, is to Wharton’s Starkfield, so is Harvard to the technological college in Worcester. The novel and the film tell different stories.

The film “Ethan Frome” is neither dark and cold enough nor rural enough. And it doesn’t sound quite right. Liam Neeson, a good actor, sounds faintly Irish (as he is). Other actors do what they can with New England speech, but that consists mostly of dropping the final “g” in participles: “watchin’,” “waitin’.” The ubiquitous “I guess” of the novel goes completely missing. Without it, we are in some other world.

*Professor C., for those new to this series, is my father. Retired from his university career, he graciously agrees to steer Privilege to the right side of the cultural tracks.

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Professor C. might be persuaded to do more such seminars in future, but he thinks that Mitford, previously suggested, might be too far outside his comfort zone. Other thoughts welcome. I’m glad to be saved from complete immersion in HBO’s Game of Thrones. I have a terrible weakness for pop culture, especially populated by wolves and hair extensions.

Have a wonderful weekend.

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Before watching the film of Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth,” directed by Terence Davies, with Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart and Eric Stolz as Lawrence Selden, I stumbled on an internet war. What follows is a much shortened version.

“mikeeoo”: This is my favorite of all the Wharton novels adapted for the screen…Absolutely true to the novel.

“rdconger”: The film and the performances were ALL abominable.

“americansykho”: Oh my. Have you ever read The House of Mirth? … I’m French and I studied literature… you definitely can’t say that “it is a transparent rip-off of Madame Bovary.”

“rdconger”: The fact that you thought the weak, aimless, and dull performances by Anderson and Stoltz were “especially amazing” tells me that you have absolutely no serious talent for assessing a performance… nor even for discerning what is “amazing” and what is “dreck.” I could point out that I read and speak French as well that I have a Ph.D. in comparative literature – but that doesn’t prove my point.

“theninthgate”: You demonstrated nothing, apart from being a “particularly inept” reader and movie viewer…I think it’s safe to assume that no one would have suspected you of having a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

“rdconger”: Well, we could continue the pissing contest, I guess….I don’t care how many critics liked this unimportant film…You make the logical error of appealing to authority.

“theninthgate”: Next time you decide to ramble about “an unimportant movie,” do your homework…don’t be such an angerball. Unless your idea of not behaving like a herd animal is to make an ass of yourself.

“rdconger”: All you can do is attack me personally, and you cannot, and do not, refute a thing I’ve said.

“theninthgate”: Relax, take a chill pill, go for a walk or something.

“rdconger”: Physician, heal thyself.

“Dracii”: wow you are a bit full of yourself, aren’t you? And you have a Ph.D. wow good for you…Dreck?? You are multi-lingual as well? Bully for you.

“x-phile-1”: I love Gillian Anderson in “The X-Files,” but I’m not blind. She was all wrong as Lily Bart.

I’ve written this without having seen the film. Now it feels like a college test. Do you agree with “rdconger” or “mikeeoo”? Why?

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Having finally watched “The House of Mirth,” I’m (reluctantly) more on the side of “rdconger, Ph.D” than that of “mikeeoo” and others who liked the film. The House of Mirth, as much as The Age of Innocence, is about what goes on beneath the surface of things. “The House of Mirth,” the film, is mostly surface, little depth.

The novel’s first scene is crucial. Lawrence Selden sees Lily Bart standing outside Grand Central Station, having missed her train to Rhinebeck, where she’s to visit the Trenors in their grand (and foolishly named) house, Bellomont. Lily has some time to kill. She and Lawrence Selden are old friends, not lovers, but attracted to each other. Lily is poor and needs a rich husband. Selden is a lawyer, not rich. How to pass the hour or two together? The dialogue between them is a masterpiece of flirtatious indirection and understandings that are never spelled out. “ ‘What luck,’” says Lily, “ ‘how nice of you to come to my rescue.’” What form should the rescue take, asks Selden? “ ‘Oh, almost any-– even to sitting on a bench and talking to me,’” says Lily, stopping herself before saying “anything.” “Anything” turns out, by stages, to be perhaps tea at Sherry’s, or tea in “a quieter place,” then a walk that leads to Selden’s apartment building, and finally, as if by accident, to tea in his apartment — “‘Why not? It’s too tempting – I’ll take the risk,’” says Lily; “Oh, I’m not dangerous,’” says Selden. He assures her, turning the latchkey, “there’s no one here.” Over tea, they talk about Lily’s need to marry.

As she leaves, Lily encounters a charwoman who looks at her askance. She is upset. “What did the creature suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting oneself to some odious conjecture?” Then, outside, she meets Simon Rosedale. “ ‘This is luck,’” he says, echoing Lily’s greeting to Selden. But why is she in town? “‘A little shopping, I suppose?’” Trapped, Lily fibs, “I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch the train to the Trenors.’” A bad mistake. Simon Rosedale owns the building, which he’s named “The Benedick” (“ ‘I believe it’s an old word for bachelors’”); “ ‘I didn’t know there were any dress-makers in the Benedick,’” he says. He offers her a ride to Grand Central: “ ‘You’ve barely time to catch the five-forty. The dress-maker kept you waiting, I suppose.’” Lily turns him down.

The film deals crudely with the minuet that Lily and Selden dance together. Some of the dialogue remains, but it is as if the director doesn’t want to waste time on human divagations and subtleties. “What luck,” says Lily, “how nice of you to come to my rescue. ” “What form should this rescue take,” Selden asks? Lily: “Oh, almost any.” Selden suggests tea at Sherry’s. Lily: “I’m dying for a cup of tea but isn’t there a quieter place? Selden: “I live near here.” Lily: “At the Benedick still?” Selden: “Yes, why don’t you come up?” Lily: “Why not? It’s too tempting – I’ll take the risk.” Nuance and tension are quite lost. Lily already knows that Selden lives at the Benedick. There is no stroll on Madison Avenue that in the novel takes them past the Benedick, where Lily asks, it seems innocently, “Do you live here?” In the novel, the dance between Lily and Selden takes time. In the film, the two of them almost rush to his apartment. And as Lily leaves Selden’s, there’s no charwoman to embarrass her and point the moral of the tale (though she does turn up later at Lily’s door to offer her Bertha Dorset’s incriminating letters to Selden). Rosedale is blunt, not oblique. “Benedick,” he says, “means confirmed bachelor.”

The players, Gillian Anderson and Eric Stolz, are to some extent hampered by their material. The rhythms of the film, in speech and movement, are as regular as a metronome, and neither of the principals manages to rise above these limitations of pace. It feels as if (I’m quoting Christopher Null) they “are reading for a play off-Broadway or in their backyard.” With her pouty lips almost always apart, Anderson emotes in a single key. Stolz doesn’t do much emoting at all until the close when, in a debased version of Wharton’s constrained ending, he weeps over Lily’s dead body. As Newland Archer in “The Age of Innocence,” Daniel Day-Lewis equally avoids emoting but imparts a depth that Stolz cannot manage. Of all the players in “The House of Mirth,” the one who most stirs the blood is Laura Linney, the wicked and lovely Bertha Dorset, whose virtuoso mobility of expression demonstrates, if proof were needed, that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Linney is the epitome of smiling vicious. Also convincing is Anthony LaPaglia, with his cool inflections, as Rosedale. Even Anderson achieves a certain frail dignity as Lily spirals downward. But I think it’s not enough.

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On the “World Socialist Website” (of all places), “published by the International Committee of the Fourth International,” is a commentary by David Walsh on “The House of Mirth,” comparing it (inevitably) to Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence.” Walsh thinks Davies’s film “incomparably superior.” Scorsese has a larger budget to underwrite all the sumptuous food and clothing and décor of rich New York, managing “in the process to miss three-quarters of Wharton’s irony and savagery” and ending up with “a flat and ultimately disappointing work.” Like “rdconger, Ph.D.,” I’m tempted to say, “you have absolutely no serious talent for assessing a performance.” Can we have seen the same films? Yes, but with different criteria of value. What Walsh values (notwithstanding his silly claim that Scorsese misses most of Wharton’s irony), and what he finds, is explicit social criticism. Davies “paints a corrupt and remorseless social universe. The work is a devastating indictment.” In a closing scene, as Lily walks to the Dorsets’ house, she passes a street orator, discordant in the narrative and absent in the novel, who tells a cheering crowd in a thick accent: “Here today, I will tell you about the plight of the poor people of Russia under the tsar” — a heavy-handed interpolation. Scorsese’s lavish food and clothing and décor, scorned by Walsh, are a more subtle and telling counterpoint both to social inequality and to the cruelties (Scorsese’s “brutality”) of New York’s social world. Davies and Walsh look in as outsiders and find corruption they knew was there before they started. Davies doesn’t care at all about the ceremonious intricacy of the Lily Bart–Lawrence Selden minuet. Scorsese works from within and allows the viewer to figure it out. The seductive temptations of food and clothing and decor are not easy to resist – even for Martin Scorsese.

Why do aesthetic disagreements become vehement? I borrow from the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics: “we think that others ought to share our judgment. That’s why we blame them if they don’t…. The judgment of taste has … an aspiration to universal validity.” That’s why “rdconger” and “theninthgate” and David Walsh and the rest of us get all riled up.

Images: All from iMDB, here.

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Lucky for you all, my family knows when I need help. Herewith a post my from my father, the professor, reviewing “The Age Of Innocence” from a personal perspective. He addresses both Edith Wharton’s novel, and Scorsese’s movie of the same name. Any goofy editorial notes are mine. But you knew that already.

I will continue to write here about style. One does what one must. Thank you for your forbearance. And Dad, thanks for the substance, and for the fun discovery towards the end of your review.

The Age of Innocence: Wharton and Scorsese

My grandmother was born about 1870, married a wealthy New Yorker, was something of a grande dame (though not all that flamboyant), and died in her nineties, having lived a life quite like those depicted in “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton’s novel and Martin Scorsese’s film. The novel and the film are both resonant.

At the turn of the century, when Wharton lived in the Berkshires, my grandmother spent a few summers there. Maybe they knew each other or met at a party. Yet there was a big difference between them. Edith Wharton led a complicated life and saw what was going on beneath the smooth surface of things . My grandmother, whose husband died in his early fifties, lived on as a widow for many decades, inhabiting to the end a world of imagined innocence. The pain and the comedy of that world equally passed her by. Or that is how it seemed to me.

That brings me to “The Age of Innocence” and New York in the 1870s. Wharton published her novel in 1920, fifty years after the fictional events took place and after World War 1 had overturned a complacent world. This story of Newland Archer’s infatuation with the glamorous Ellen, Countess Olenska, and his marriage, against his own deepest instincts, to the far more proper May Welland, is a tale of social inhibition and frustrated desire. But it is also a comedy of manners, informed by Wharton’s opulent imagination and narrative power.

Wharton  introduces Mrs. Manson Mingott, grandmother to Ellen and to May, as a huge Cycladic idol, a female Falstaff, her plus plus plus size marking her as a life force and as the moral center of the story. The baroque hilarity of Wharton’s prose, set of course in an era before abundance of flesh came to seem a moral failing, could not be bettered.  Mrs. Mingott, vastly corpulent, is a ruined Pompeii, still very grand though covered by the ashes of time:

“The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.”

I can only imagine, enviously, what it would be like to be able to write like that.

True, the comedy yields to sadness as the story works its way to a melancholy end. Ellen has gone back to Europe, though not to her disreputable husband; May has died after twenty-five years of marriage; and Archer arrives in Paris with his grown son, who has arranged — in the liberated manner of the new generation – for them to see Ellen. But Archer asks his son to visit the countess in her upper story flat without him. On a park bench, looking upward at her window, Archer imagines people in the room, among them “a dark lady, pale and dark” – then realizes, speaking to himself, “it’s more real to me here than if I went up.” A servant appears and closes the shutters. Archer walks slowly back to his hotel by himself. Even in this melancholy close, there remains a trace of the comic. Silly man, you think, what is the matter with him? He has traded in the flesh and blood of the actual world for fantasy: Ellen is more real as a nostalgic memory than as a living person.

However much the life of 1870s New York depended on strict codes of social behavior, however much it subdued real feelings in favor of conventional manners, Wharton understood that this way of life – which she had herself renounced, divorcing her mentally troubled and unfaithful husband; briefly keeping up an affair, already several years ongoing, with the bisexual Morton Fullerton; and moving to France where she died in 1937 — could seem like a safe harbor.

Not long after arriving in New York, Ellen says to Newland : “I want to feel cared for and safe.” And, “being here is like–like–being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one’s lessons.” And, of the house where she’s living, “To me it’s like heaven.” And, later, in a letter to Newland from the Van der Luydens’ very grand country house: “I feel myself so safe here.” This is not just a comic misperception of how things really are. Safety may lie in not knowing all that could be known. At least I’m sure that’s what my grandmother felt; and, growing up in that orbit and being a good little boy who did all his lessons, I suppose that in a way I did, too.

Scorsese’s Age of Innocence

Scorsese’s “Age of Innocence” surprised those who expected him to stick to the mean streets. What was this muse of the down-and-out doing in the upper class environs of 1870s New York? We look for consistency in our artists and writers and directors because consistency makes it easier to understand them. One film critic compares the social codes of Wharton’s people in Scorsese’s treatment to those of the Mafia. Even Scorsese seems to want to be more like himself than he seems: in an interview he described how he saw the story: “What has always stuck in my head is the brutality under the manners. People hide what they mean under the surface of language.” I hesitate very much at “brutality” though not at the claim that the surface of things fails to match up with the reality. It’s best to take the film on its own terms and not try to shape it into another “Goodfellas,” whatever Scorsese himself may think. Intention is not everything.

The film captures all of the pain in Wharton’s novel but less of the comic side. It could hardly do otherwise because so much of the comedy lodges in the dispassionate commentary of Wharton’s narrator. In the film, Joanne Woodward’s cool and witty voice-over fills in for Wharton’s as well as could be, but there is no recreating all the narrative flashes of wit and virtuoso descriptions that fall outside the ebb and flow of action and dialogue. In the novel, action and commentary are seamless. In the film, too much comic commentary would subvert the mood. And there is no way to reproduce visually Wharton’s vision of Mrs. Mingott as a ruined Pompeii. If this were heard as a voice-over, the actual sight of Mrs. Mingott would be an anti-climax instead of the visual treat that it is, not without comic flair — Miriam Margolyes plays the role wonderfully – but without the baroque overlay of Wharton’s prose. The novel and the film require different degrees of self-distancing.

At the same time, Scorsese and his film writer Jay Cocks add much of their own to the film, sometimes in the interests of accessibility, sometimes in a spirit of exuberant invention. In the novel, Archer’s son is named Dallas; in the film he is Ted. Dallas is a family name of the sort favored for male children in 1870s New York. Some of Wharton’s players are Lawrence Lefferts, Manson Mingott, Sillerton Jackson (a memory of Morton Fullerton here?) as well as Newland Archer and Dallas Archer. But viewers would probably have thought of the Cowboys had Archer’s son been named Dallas. This is an easy alteration, among several, to enhance clarity. More substantial and very engaging is Mrs. Mingott’s gaggle of Pomeranians, perhaps suggested by Wharton’s description of Mrs. Mingott’s “little hands” nestling “in a hollow of her huge lap like pet animals.” Pomeranians, Queen Victoria’s favorite dog, are the perfect choice for Mrs. Mingott and her sumptuous surroundings. Mozart is said to have dedicated an aria to his pet Pomeranian.

But the film’s most inventive move, unnoticed so far as I’ve seen by the critics, lies in its casting of the countess and May Welland, Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen, Winona Ryder as May. In conventional iconography, made familiar by Sir Walter Scott, the blonde heroine is the virtuous innocent; the dark heroine, the dangerous and passionate outsider. Scorsese reverses these types. (Ed. note: Scott wrote Ivanhoe. I read it when I was 12. I remember nothing.)

In the novel, the “dark lady, pale and dark,” of Archer’s imagining reminds young Miss Blenker, at whose house the countess has been staying, of the dark and sultry actress Mrs. Scott Siddons: “I do love the way she does her hair, don’t you?” … Doesn’t she remind you of Mrs. Scott-Siddons…? ” In the film, Miss Blenker says instead: “I do love the way she does her hair, don’t you? It reminds me of Sir Walter Scott,” evidently to cue a savvy audience that fair and dark have been exchanged. (Did Scorsese and Jay Cocks intend this? If they didn’t — and it seems almost certain that they did — it’s an instance of genius stumbling onto good answers to tactical problems.)  (Ed. Note: Are we surprised that it’s all about the hair color?)

The strawberry blonde, blue-eyed Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen wears her hair in artful ringlets, like Scott’s Saxon heroine Rowena (in Ivanhoe). The dark-haired, brown-eyed Winona Ryder as May supplants the virginal blue-eyed heroine of the novel, to whom Archer sends a box of white lilies-of-the valley each day, whose wind-blown hair in one scene glitters “like silver wire,” and who wears her hair (like Michelle Pfeiffer’s), in “accumulated coils.” The reversal works beautifully: the innocent May Welland is an adroit schemer; the exotic Ellen Olenska, something of a naïf. Surface and reality are confused. Things are far off key. Nothing is quite how it seems or the way we expect it to be. On the one hand Scorsese transforms the novel; on the other he reinforces its overriding theme.

I’ve not looked this closely at a film before. Add it all together – script, technique, settings, soundtrack, costumes, hairdos, everything – and “The Age of Innocence” must be one of the best ever. Its sole Academy Award was for costume design.

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The differences between “The Age of Innocence,” the novel, and “The Age of Innocence,” the film, are differences between art forms, the one, in this case, quite as good as the other.

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Images: Amazon (yes, that is the Kindle edition. What?),  Allstar Pics

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