Tales of men and women

Cold morning with something unusual for here: a couple of orioles in the lilac bush. Lilac bushes are about as common as dandelions in the northeast (hence the lilacs of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," but a morning with orioles in the lilac bush and goldfinches at the feeder? That's like a flash of sunset at noon. Despite the cold and yesterday's snow flurries, this has been a good week for songbird color with goldfinches and purple finches. I'm drinking tea and reading the distressing article in "The Atlantic" article on "the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States"--socialist Venezuela. If you are drawn to Kafka on the toils of a man caught by the system, or else want to know about exactly how helpless a mother and father can be in the face of government corruption and abrupt loss of essential goods like drugs and food, have a read. The stories are heartbreaking.

Interesting to me for a number of reasons, most of them obvious--one of them local, as there is a Cooperstown connection--is this article, "The Diminution of Women Writers: An American Tradition." I'm not surprised that the author mentions Hawthorne's influence on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and his dislike for much of the "scribbling" mob of women. I adore Hawthorne and always feel congenial with him, but wouldn't it be good to have some stories by Sophia, and not just her paintings? The writer gives Constance Fenimore Woolson, named in part after her great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, as a prime example: "Woolson’s work and career are a reminder that women’s literary ambitions are not a recent phenomenon. She was a writer who aimed for and reached the heights of literary recognition, despite even greater obstacles than those facing women writers today." She and Henry James were very close friends--close enough to have destroyed their letters to each other--and she influenced his work. Various people have suggested that The Beast in the Jungle is based on his feeling for Constance Fenimore Woolson. I have read that it was William Dean Howells who buried her reputation as a writer after her suicide, and unfortunately James did not defend her in print. Now her books are at last on the rise again.

Painter Yolanda Sharpe reminded me of the case of married painters Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, and how Pollock received far more attention. So I dug up this marvelous little quote from ARTnews (1949): "There is a tendency among some of these wives to 'tidy up' their husband's styles. Lee Krasner (Mrs. Jackson Pollock) takes her husband's paint and enamels and changes his unrestrained, sweeping lines into neat little squares and triangles." Aren't those phrases interesting? The name of the show, the tidying wife, the "Mrs. Jackson Pollock," the neatness, the "littleness." "Some of these wives." So the reviewer "sees" that masculine lack of restrain and "sweeping" lines beat female, so little and neat. (I find it hard to apply either adjective to Lee Krasner.)

And painter Ashley Cooper reminded me of the much-shared article about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, "Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art."  I went back and looked at it again, Frida Kahlo photographed in what the journalist calls her "foolish little ruffled apron," tied over a black silk dress. She is "a miniature-like little person." Her "miniature-like technique" is opposed to the "heroic" figures of Rivera. The author clearly admires the work, though, describing "a skillful and beautiful style." Perhaps the most interesting element in the article is how well Kahlo knows that it is useless to defend her work or expose her secret ambition, and how she employs truth and laughter. He is the art star, come to Detroit to paint his Detroit industry murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and her own work is just beginning to flower. Listen to how she tells the truth of what she knows is inside her, beginning to break forth: "Of course, he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist." She laughs and mocks her questioner, but in the end she is right. At that moment, he is the better artist. Later on, she will surpass him.

***

And for a postscript, a little Emily Dickinson and Billy Collins...

Long ago and far away

One of the unused Clive Hicks-Jenkins
images for The Foliate Head--it seems
to fit this Whitmanian post...

"Walt Whitman" just followed me on twitter, and that made me remember that I had a professor once who made me read great swaths of Whitman aloud in class. We had an 8:00 start time, but he made us arrive at 7:00 a.m., a great trial for the young, who think they have long lives ahead, not knowing that life is a mere blink, and so feel that they need much sleep. We had to arrive early because he was such a great believer in feeling the rhythms of poetry or prose in our bones, and so we read as well as discussed. I suppose it was, even then, an old-fashioned way to teach, but I imagine that it was effective in a time when theory was already in ascendance.

Our professor would often arrive singing "Lili Marleen," a thing that somewhat disconcerted me because my legal first name is Susan (meaning "Lily") and my middle name "Marlene." He was always cheerful and clearly the famous early bird, which most of us were not. If we were reading poetry, he would always want me to read because he liked the way I read poetry, and if we were on Whitman, he would rarely let anybody else get a word in. Some mornings at 7:00 I could hardly speak! But Whitman tends to wake a person, even a young and sleepy person. The professor was a bright, amusing man, to whom a number of sad things later happened that are nobody's business. But he seemed to have strong friendships with colleagues and a deep love of literature, so I think he must have had, overall, a satisfying life.

He's long gone now, gone to the grass under my boot-soles, as the poet he loved so much said, even longer ago. They were kindred in some ways, and departed "as air." They shook "white locks at the runaway sun." They effused "flesh in eddies, and drift[ed] it in lacy jags. And so this morning I read a little Whitman aloud in the honor of that long-ago professor, the early bird, the lover of poetry, the man of great good cheer.

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

--Whitman, shaker of white locks at the runaway sun

* * *

Notes on my recent books, no. 3
excerpt, ABOUT.COM CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 
(click above for complete review)
It is seldom that a novel from a small university press can compete with the offerings from the big houses in New York. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage may be the best novel this reviewer has read this year. Its quality and story-telling remind one of The Adventures of Roderick Random, Great Expectation and The Grapes of Wrath among others. The winner of the 2012 "Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction," A Death has the potential to become a classic American picaresque novel. / One wishes, however, that this novel will not get shunted into the regional box and be seen only as a Southern novel. Its themes and the power of its language, the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters have earned the right to a broad national audience. 30 July 2012 John M. Formy-Duval