The Edge of Love

Saw The Edge of Love over the weekend (seemed appropriate as I was in Wales). It’s billed as “the first film about Dylan Thomas’s life”, but really it’s not so much about Thomas as about the two women in his life; his wife, Caitlin, played by Sienna Miller, and his childhood sweetheart, Vera (Keira Knightley). In fact Thomas (Matthew Rhys) seems a remarkably unattractive character – there are flashes of humanity – when he gets beaten up for “not being a hero” (ie not fighting in the war – he had weak lungs) – but generally, he seems flabby, child-like, self-indulgent, and entirely undeserving of two beautiful and independent women. How true to the real Thomas this is I don’t know, but as ever, it seems that being a great poet doesn’t make you a likeable – or even particularly interesting – person.
The relationships in the film are fascinating, though. Thomas clearly wants to have his cake and eat it; the women don’t just put up with this but instead form a friendship that seems to transcend the usual petty boundaries of love, rivalry and jealousy. The war (the film is set in London during the Second World War) is seen mostly as bombs, soldiers and a brief bit of fighting when Vera’s husband is in Greece, but the real war is at home, as relationship battles are fought and not won but truces are called. It’s not a particularly active film, though – you do leave the cinema wondering what, exactly, happened...
Actually in tone – poetry read over scenes, gloomy passages when no-one speaks, ‘artistic’ layered images – the film reminds me of Sylvia, the film of Plath’s disintegrating relationship with Ted Hughes. There are, it seems, no happy endings for anyone involved with a poet. I’m still not sure whether or not I actually enjoyed The Edge of Love, but I’m glad I saw it – like Sylvia, it’s a film that will stay with me. Unlike Sylvia, though, it hasn’t particularly made me want to return to Thomas’s poetry.

O, reason not the need!

Recently I went to see King Lear at the Globe. One of my favourite A-level texts, I went with the some school-friends to relive our A-levels, and we were amazed by just how much we could still quote – we were obviously taught well! Lear is an odd play, I think. A slightly silly plot (man gives away property to daughters based on how much they claim to love him; war and madness ensue), it seems like the end of a Shakespearean comedy rather than the beginning of a tragedy. It seems less about filial affection, and property, than about reason, madness and human nature, to me. The programme talked about homelessness being central to the plot, which I suppose it is, but only in the sense of what we need – one of those things, we assume, being a home (emotionally and mentally as well as physically). And yet Lear claims (in his madness) that we need none of those things we assume we need:
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beasts.
David Calder’s Lear was perfectly judged – venerable yet vulnerable in his madness, he was a traditional yet utterly believable Lear, opening himself to the heavens on the heath (at which point it obligingly rained). The Fool, played by Danny Lee Wynter (Joe’s Palace, Hot Fuzz), so difficult to get right, was both unnerving and comic, echoing Lear’s madness and attempting to get him to face it. I was however slightly disappointed by Edgar and Edmund – the former seemed to lack the gravitas needed, particularly in the closing lines of the play, while the latter was, well, not quite sexy enough for the dastardly villain he plays – but this may be because our teen-age minds were clouded somewhat by seeing Adrian Dunbar as Edmund at the Royal Court in (I think) 1993.... The mark of conviction in a performance is when you know what’s going to happen (here, Gloucester’s eyes; Cordelia’s fate) and you are still on the edge of your seat somehow praying for a reversal of the inevitable, and I certainly felt that here.
I’ll resist deconstructing the play itself, but suffice to say I highly recommend this – it shows King Lear as everything it should be – tragic, funny, moving, unsettling, cathartic; and indeed the Globe itself, with its attempts to give an authentic experience, with only the faintest whiff of commercial tourism.

Aurora Leigh (essential reading for EVERYONE)

I just like this:

For 'tis not in mere death that men die most;
And, after our first girding of the loins
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery,
To run up hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.

From Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1856

RA Summer Exhibition

Went to the RA Summer Exhibition yesterday, which was - well, quite overwhelming actually. Talking about it afterwards with the other people I went with, we all managed to miss quite a few things - I don't think I've ever been to an exhibition with quite so many varied pictures before. But - it was fascinating, it made me realise that I know virtually nothing about contemporary art, and I'll definitely be back next year. Anyway, there was so much there that it's difficult to say much meaningful about it, so I'll stick to some basics: it helped me realise that I particularly like gloomy things (despite what I said about primary colours recently), and I find trees endlessly fascinating. I like Matthew Ablitt's etching, By the Moon (left), for example - dark (rather than necessarily gloomy) and somehow romantic. I am still in love with Jeff Koons' egg, though - and it's even better in situ, since it's bigger, bluer and shiny than I'd expected, yet so fragile (apparently if it is touched it has to be repainted), and, best of all, it reflects the domed, skylighted ceiling above it spectacularly.

I was also quite taken with Jean Cooke's Dream Dream (right) - both child-like but with the dark lilies seeming to be a portent of something threatening. I'm no art critic, but I just find it fascinating to see what certain paintings make me feel. I wished I could buy some - many were much more affordable than I expected - but I restrained myself - this year...

What surprised me - and this shows my ignorance of contemporary art, perhaps - is how traditionally representative many of the works were, which led to a discussion about the purpose of art: I suppose I've always been one of those slightly (no, sorry, very) pretentious-sounding people who thinks that the arts make the world, educate, inform, whatever - but of course, perhaps sometimes it's just meant to be decorative (can it ever "just" be decorative?) I have to think about this. As Aristotle said (and it's true for all the arts), "poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars." True - but the exhibition was also a warning not to be too high-flown about stuff - some of it we took with a pinch of salt and a few giggles, and I was fascinated by the people standing around what looked like a lampshade saying, "This is deeply meaningful". Deeply something, anyway.

Phantom

Yesterday I went to see Phantom, an exhibition of paintings by Alison Watt, at the National Gallery. I’d noticed on the NG website that Watt was fascinated by "the suggestive power of fabric", which sounded cryptic and possibly interesting, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a small exhibition (and free) – only 7 paintings, plus Saint Francis in Meditation (1635-9) by Zurbaran, a painting which began Watt’s love-affair with fabric – she describes the fabric in the painting as "like a living mass", "so sculptural, it seems as if the folds have been carved rather than painted."
There is a short film about the pieces, in which Watt says that it’s about "negative space" – something particularly apparent in Eye, which is not so much a window of the soul as a porthole looking out onto nothingness. However, I think it appealed to me because of the very – fabric-ness of it. White is usually seen as uncomplicated, simple – white sheets, white paper, white snow. This is a very complicated white indeed – shadowed and textured and deep, somehow more complex than colour (and usually, I’m a sucker for colour, bold primaries, hence my interest in Pre-Raphaelitism). Walking towards Root, I felt as though I was going to be sucked into a vortex of whiteness, and quite welcomed the idea (even though my childhood nightmares were about this!) The paintings reminded me of rumpled sheets, which are usually fraught with emotions - even if only in an "I must do the laundry" kind of way...

Sound poems

I spent some considerable time this year explaining "what is poetry?" to undergrads. No, it doesn't have to rhyme, it doesn't have to have a narrative thread, etc etc - but does it have to make sense? In fact, does it even have to use words? Seahorses and Flying Fish had my class in hysterics, and I still can't decide if I think it's poetry. I like multi-media work, so this is interesting in that it juxtaposes image and sound, but....well, there are lots of buts. In some ways it's closer to music - perhaps.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

I saw The Culture Show programme on the RA Summer Exhibition (you can see it here) and am very pleased to have found a willing friend to come with me to see it next week. I'm fascinated by the large shiny blue egg - aka Jeff Koons' "Cracked Egg (Blue)", left, which won the Charles Wollaston award for the most distinguished work in the exhibition. Not sure I understand it but I like the colour...will report back when I've seen it in the flesh, so to speak.

I've never been to the Summer Exhibition before so am strangely excited by it!!

And another thing...

The point of my re-vamping my blog was to re-inspire my interest in things cultural, basically. (And possibly to procrastinate in writing a hellish conference paper). A very apt poem by Dorothy Parker says

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme -
I never said they feed my heart
But still they pass my time.

twilight is not good for maidens is about the things that pass my time - and perhaps feed my heart a little too :-)
Incidentally, I read somewhere recently (Frieda Hughes in the Times last week?) that no-one can say they don't like poetry; it's just that they haven't found the right poem yet. That does sound a bit like the gut-wrenchingly vomit-inducing phrase "There are no strangers here, only friends you haven't met yet", but I applaud the sentiment.

Research proposals

At the moment, I'm going through the infamous mid-Ph.D. slump, when I'd rather do pretty much anything (including marking GCSE papers, and, apparently, updating my blog) than actually get on with my thesis. However, this is what my thesis is supposedly about:

Thesis title: Christina Rossetti and the Influence of Gothic
Director of Studies: Professor Fiona Robertson
My original title was "Representations of Pre-Raphaelitism in Criticism and Fiction", and I proposed to examine the myth-making process instigated by the Brotherhood themselves, and subsequently perpetuated by their biographers, who were often related to members of the group or had axes to grind. It became apparent early on in my research that such a study would not be manageable in the context of a Ph.D. Having reviewed recent secondary literature in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and the Rossettis, I concluded that there is increasing critical interest in Christina Rossetti's poetry, but that existing scholarship neglects the important influence of Tractarianism and Gothic literature on her work, and tends to ignore her both her early poems and also her later explicitly devotional poems. I thus decided to make Christina Rossetti the main focus of my research, since this is an area which touches on several developing trends in nineteenth-century studies, such as the increased attention paid to Victorian women poets and the "poetess tradition" since the mid-1990s, and the associated revival of interest in nineteenth-century religious culture, within which women played a central role.
Further research into Rossetti's poetry from her early poems, often dismissed as juvenilia, which refer to her reading of the Gothic novels of C R Maturin, and the apocalyptic prose of her last years, suggest a Gothic sensibility. Few critics have examined her early engagement with the Gothic, notably through the works of Maturin and Ann Radcliffe, and also through 'The Vampyre', a tale written by her uncle, John Polidari. Both her poetics and her subjects reflect this interest in Gothic literature, and my research will cover much new ground by considering Rossetti's poetry in terms of the Gothic, and exploring her use of the tropes of Gothic, such as fallen women, doubles and spectres.
My planned chapters are:
Christina Rossetti and Gothic Literature (Introduction and literature review)
The Maturin poems and the early influence of Gothic
‘Goblin Market’ and its multiple interpretations
Spectres and spectrality
Gothic and Rossetti’s devotional poems and prose
Gothic, Sing Song and children’s literature

The Mitford Sisters

A few years ago, I read The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell - mostly because The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford are two of my most re-read books. I wrote this about it when I read it:
This has to be one of the most enjoyable biographies I have read for a long time. Although it's not a short book, it makes easy reading, written as it is in Mary Lovell's delightful style that is strongly reminiscent of Nancy Mitford's books. If you know her books, you'll love it for the insight into her life behind the books, particularly the girls' fascinating childhood; if you don't you'll be intrigued by the ups and downs of the family fortunes and their friendships with notable figures from Hitler to the Kennedys. This book is not just a biography of a famous and remarkable family, it is also a panoramic view of the history of the last century. Whatever happened, a Mitford was there - the war (both in Germany and Britain), the Communist movement, and so much more.Reading biography is almost as much an art as writing one, in the way each reader relates personally to the characters with whom they become intellectually involved, and in the reading of this book it is easy to become very involved indeed and, unlike many biographies, it does not seem to fade away towards the end; Mary Lovell's writing retains our interest right until the close.

So, at Easter this year I commenced reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley, while I was on holiday. A word of advice: for goodness' sake read the paperback. I started this in March; I finished it yesterday. The only other book that's taken me that long to read is The Golden Notebook - but that's another story... Anyway, the problem is that the hardback Mitford letters is so heavy that my usual reading-places - the bath and the bus - are out, so I got through it reading about ten letters a night in bed. But I have to say, it's been worth the slog! Sometimes reading editions of letters is about as exciting as reading a shopping list, so I've been trying to work out why this one kept me interested. Well, as the review above notes, they did know everyone, which is interesting in itself. More, though, it's their acerbic wit - no qualms about being rude, about others or to each other. I loved their names for everyone (the Queen Mother is Cake, because of a comment she made about a cake); and the little anecdotes they tell each other, very amusingly (such as Roy Hattersely's teeth falling out in the middle of lunch).

The book is highly entertaining; but it's more than that. For one thing, as an only child I just don't understand sibling relationships, so for me it was an interesting insight into the wildly differing relationships they had with each other. The letters are also very telling in their frank, sensible way of discussing marriage, children, society dinners and the trials of old age - the latter being particularly moving, especially as the sisters die. Another intriguing aspect was their concern - particularly Deborah, Diana and Jessica - for their public face - the books they wrote and that were written about them, and their desire to protect the memory of their parents and sister Unity.

The letters are sensitively edited (Charlotte Moseley is Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law), with footnotes explaining in-jokes or obscure references, and the volume is also indexed, which must have been a labour of love. It's well worth reading - it just shouldn't take three months to do so!