Literature

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front (1929)

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Last week’s University Challenge asked which literary work opens with these lines: “We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of bully beef and beans”. Like a shot, I metaphorically spat out my cornflakes in a garbled attempt to get my answer out before the brainiacs on the quiz show – “err, err, I know this…orl-quiet-onza-western-front…”! I had recognised the line due to having only just read the book, giving me one of those serendipitously rare advantages in TV’s toughest quiz.

All Quiet on the Western Front (in the original German, Im Westen nichts Neues, literally “In the West, nothing new”) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Erich Maria Remarque, drawn from his experiences as a German veteran of World War I. The book is a first-person, present-tense portrayal of life in the German trenches in the Great War, a story of extreme physical and mental trauma, punctuated by boredom and ennui. The narrator, Paul, has come to the trenches straight from school – reminding us of the young age of these lads – and he is accompanied by several classmates, all spurred on by their teacher to enlist and none of whom will return home.

It is rightly considered to be one of the greatest war novels of all time, and it comes as no surprise to learn that it was one of the books banned and burned by Nazi Germany in the 1930s (who weren’t keen on the subversive “war is hell and really isn’t worth it” tone of the book). It has been translated to the big screen on three occasions, most recently, – and successfully – by Edward Berger’s 2022 adaptation, which won four Academy Awards.

When the novel isn’t focused on the nightmare of trench warfare, we learn of life during the “quiet” times in between action on the front line, marked in random order by boredom, black humour, camaraderie, and obsession with finding food to supplement their meagre rations. The excerpt I have chosen below describes one such illicit mission by Paul and his mate Kat to steal a goose from regimental headquarters. This theme of hard-won sustenance, which probably only those who have experienced genuine hunger can truly appreciate, is exquisitely described. It has an air of comedy caper about it, but ends with the sublime satisfaction of satiety, a rare moment of calm before the inevitable return to reality.

Kat hoists me up. I rest my foot in his hands and climb over the wall.

Kat keeps watch below.

I wait a few moments to accustom my eyes to the darkness. Then I recognise the shed. Softly I steal across, lift the peg, pull it out and open the door.

I distinguish two white patches. Two geese, that’s bad: if I grab one the other will cackle. Well, both of them–if I’m quick, it can be done.

I make a jump. I catch hold of one and the next instant the second. Like a madman I bash their heads against the wall to stun them. But I haven’t quite enough weight. The beasts cackle and strike out with their feet and wings. I fight desperately, but Lord! what a kick a goose has! They struggle and I stagger about. In the dark these white patches are terrifying. My arms have grown wings and I’m almost afraid of going up into the sky, as though I held a couple of captive balloons in my fists.

Then the row begins; one of them gets his breath and goes off like an alarm clock. Before I can do anything, something comes in from outside; I feel a blow, lie outstretched on the floor, and hear awful growls. A dog. I steal a glance to the side, he makes a snap at my throat. I lie still and tuck my chin into my collar.

It’s a bulldog. After an eternity he withdraws his head and sits down beside me. But if I make the least movement he growls. I consider. The only thing to do is to get hold of my small revolver, and that too before anyone arrives. Inch by inch I move my hand toward it.

I have the feeling that it lasts an hour. The slightest movement and then an awful growl; I lie still, then try again. When at last I have the revolver my hand starts to tremble. I press it against the ground and say over to myself: Jerk the revolver up, fire before he has a chance to grab, and then jump up.

Slowly I take a deep breath and become calmer. Then I hold my breath, whip up the revolver, it cracks, the dog leaps howling to one side, I make for the door of the shed and fall head over heels over one of the scuttering geese.

At full speed I seize it again, and with a swing toss it over the wall and clamber up. No sooner am I on top than the dog is up again as lively as ever and springs at me. Quickly I let myself drop. Ten paces away stands Kat with the goose under his arm. As soon as he sees me we run.

At last we can take a breather. The goose is dead, Kat saw to that in a moment. We intend to roast it at once so that nobody will be any wiser. I fetch a dixie and wood from the hut and we crawl into a small deserted lean-to which we use for such purposes. The single window space is heavily curtained. There is a sort of hearth, an iron plate set on some bricks. We kindle a fire.

Kat plucks and cleans the goose. We put the feathers carefully to one side. We intend to make two cushions out of them with the inscription: “Sleep soft under shell-fire.” The sound of the gunfire from the front penetrates into our refuge. The glow of the fire lights up our faces, shadows dance on the wall. Sometimes a heavy crash and the lean-to shivers. Aeroplane bombs. Once we hear a stifled cry. A hut must have been hit.

Aeroplanes drone; the tack-tack of machine guns breaks out. But no light that could be observed shows from us. We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don’t talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have had a single thought in common–now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.

It takes a long time to roast a goose, even when it is young and fat. So we take turns. One bastes it while the other lies down and sleeps. A grand smell gradually fills the hut.

Then he says: “It’s done.”

“Yes, Kat.”

I stir myself. In the middle of the room shines the brown goose. We take out our collapsible forks and our pocket-knives and each cuts off a leg. With it we have army bread dipped in gravy. We eat slowly and with gusto.

“How does it taste, Kat?”

“Good! And yours?”

“Good, Kat.”

We are brothers and press on one another the choicest pieces. Afterwards I smoke a cigarette and Kat a cigar. There is still a lot left.

Erich Maria Remarque
Poetry

John Keats’ Ode, To Autumn (1819)

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Autumn is in the air, a sign that is welcomed in my household, and one which triggers a swapping out of cushions and candles for ones befitting the season. Autumnal colours and aromas abound. My weekend walk was cooler and cloudier but the hedgerows were still full of late-fruiting blackberries, and the walk brought to mind that famous opening line of John Keats’ poem On Autumn, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Let’s talk about Keats…

Along with Shelley and Byron, Keats is the classic exemplar of the archetypal Romantic poet, the fay, tortured genius. In Keats’ case, he was also consumptive and short-lived, dying at 25 and thus – a bit like the 27 club of the modern era – being conferred everlasting legendary status. He trained to be a doctor and worked at Guy’s Hospital in London, but he had long resolved to become a poet and so spent more and more time devoted to the study of literature and the penning of lines of poetry.

Although he wrote epics, sonnets and elegies, Keats’ most famous and well-regarded poems were his odes, written in quick succession during an extraordinary spell of creativity in 1819, at his friend Charles Armitage Brown’s house, Wentworth Place on Hampstead Heath. He wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode to Psyche during the spring, and finally, despite worsening health and looming financial woes, To Autumn in September. This was to be his last major work before tuberculosis brought the curtain down on his career.

After his stay with Brown, Keats moved to Italy, seeking a more salubrious climate to aid in his recovery, but it wasn’t to be. I have visited the small room in the house by the Spanish Steps in Rome, in which Keats spent his last days. He died on the 23rd February 1821, and is buried in the city’s Protestant cemetery (as is his good friend Shelley).

Keats’ House, by the Spanish Steps, Rome

He was convinced that he had made no mark in his lifetime and in February 1820, when he knew that he was dying, he wrote: “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d”. Little did he know that he would indeed be remembered to posterity, more perhaps than he could ever have imagined – people like me, after all, are still writing about him over two hundred years later!

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

 

Film, TV, and Theatre

Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957)

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Classics night at Cottage Road cinema is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving! Just as the dust settles on my recent blog about Bad Day at Black Rock, this month’s feature compelled me to write about another classic from the fifties, Sidney Lumet’s legal drama 12 Angry Men (1957). The film was Sidney Lumet’s directorial debut, so not a bad start given that it’s regarded by many as one of the greatest films of all time and that he was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards (he would go on to be nominated for three other films, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the satirical drama Network (1976) and the legal thriller The Verdict (1982)).

12 Angry Men was adapted from a 1954 teleplay of the same name by Reginald Rose and tells the story of a jury of twelve men as they deliberate over whether the teenager that they have just seen charged with the murder of his father should be convicted or acquitted on the basis of reasonable doubt. As they troop into the jurors’ room it soon becomes clear that they all regard the case as open-and-shut: the accused is clearly guilty. They anticipate a quick unanimous agreement to a ‘guilty’ verdict after which they can return to their lives. However, when they conduct a preliminary tally of the jurors’ positions and the ‘guilty’ votes pile in, they are somewhat irritated to find that the twelfth man, played brilliantly by Henry Fonda, cannot in good conscience vote guilty. What ensues is a tour de force of psychodrama as every man is forced to question his morals, values and assumptions.

Almost the entire film is shot in the jurors’ room in which they are ensconced. It’s a hot summer’s night, the heat is sweat-inducing, the fan isn’t working, and most of the chaps are smoking, and it all adds to the claustrophobic, stifling tension of the scene. Fonda’s character, Juror 8, begins to calmly dismantle the assumptions that his co-jurors have so readily accepted. He outlines alternative feasible scenarios to the ones pressed by the prosecution and remains adamant that reasonable doubt exists. His arguments don’t at first find favour, but gradually, one by one, the other jurors come around to his point of view.

There’s some great acting talent on display here, with terrific performances from Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Lee J Cobb. The dialogue is electric and the cinematography is in the realist style courtesy of Boris Kaufman who had recently won an Academy Award for On The Waterfront. The camera work contributes to the claustrophobia by gradually increasing the focal length as the film progresses, going from above eye-level, wide-angle lens at the beginning to lower angle, telephoto lens close-ups at the end.

Let’s watch juror 3, the hot-tempered and most passionate advocate of a ‘guilty verdict’, played mesmerizingly by Lee J Cobb, as his defiance as last man standing finally crumbles.

Henry Fonda as Juror 8
Sidney Lumet

 

Poetry

Ben Johnson’s Encomium To Shakespeare (1623)

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For some years now I have been interested in the Shakespeare authorship question: did the man from Stratford really pen the plays and poems attributed to him, or was he just a front for some other true genius? Anti-Stratfordians (those of the latter persuasion) point out that the sheer breadth of education, knowledge, experience and erudition displayed in the works of Shakespeare is simply incompatible with a man born to illiterate parents, raised in an unremarkable provincial town and educated (maybe) at his local grammar school. Evidence exists to show that the Shakespeare of Stratford engaged in grain-dealing, money-lending, and acting, and was a shareholder in an acting company…but nothing that shows he was an actual writer.

In a rigorous piece of research, Diana Price compared the extant documentary evidence of various kinds with two dozen other big-name Elizabethan poets and playwrights. She looked at the literary paper trails of the likes of Edmund Spencer, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Green and Thomas Nashe and found plenty of evidence of correspondences about literary matters, having patrons, having extant manuscripts, notice at death etc, but found precious little evidence in favour of the man from Stratford; look at the empty final column here (click to enlarge):

Elizabethan literary paper trail summary

It certainly seems strange that no-one seemed to notice when Shakespeare died – where was the fanfare? Some might point to Ben Johnson as one who explicitly lauded Shakespeare in his encomium To the memory of my Beloved the Author, Mr William Shakespeare, in his preface to the First Folio (the common name for the collection of 36 Shakespeare plays published in 1623), but this was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Plenty of standalone editions of the plays, with his name emblazoned on the cover, existed prior to his death, so why the radio silence?

The scholar Alexander Waugh, a leading Oxfordian (those advocating for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the true author), has a field day with this poem, reminding us that Ben Johnson was known by contemporaries for his double meanings, classical allusions and use of numbers to reveal hidden meanings to the learned few. Waugh argues that Ben Johnson, along with all the other dramatists of the age, was “in the know” about the true identity of the writer of the Shakespeare plays, and he peppered his encomium with clues pointing to Edward de Vere.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

There is no room in this blog to explore that argument, as compelling as it is, so instead let’s just take the content on its prima facie meaning. It is, after all, in praise of the greatest dramatist of all time, responsible for all those works of genius, and that praise is surely justified whoever that man was!

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much;
‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed,
Above th’ ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion’d Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Tri’umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs
And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature’s family.
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet’s matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet’s made, as well as born;
And such wert thou. Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish’d at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.

Ben Johnson

 

Literature

Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959)

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Back in 2003, whilst on a cruise of the Black Sea, we dined each night with an elderly couple, Evan and Vivien Davies, who turned out to be charming and interesting company. They were clearly well-connected and rather posh, and Evan in particular had lived what sounded like a pretty adventurous life back in the day: British Commando during the war; member of Special Branch’s anti-terrorist unit, responsible for protecting Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin (1945-50); and Assistant Superintendent of Police, British Malaya (1950-52). We got on tremendously well despite an age difference of some four decades and I’ll never forget Evan, responding to being gently nudged by Vivien to calm down at one point, stating to the table: “I do apologise – I do tend to get giddy when in good company”! To cap it all, Vivien mentioned that she had recently attended the funeral of Sir Wilfred Thesiger…

Wilfred Thesiger! I knew that name…one of the greats of British exploration, perhaps the last great British explorer. Between 1945 and 1950 Thesiger criss-crossed the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, with the help of the Bedu people with whom he acquired a lifelong bond, and with whom he endured hardships and real-and-present dangers on an almost daily basis. Carrying basic supplies and water stored in goatskins (to be refilled at waterholes perhaps hundreds of miles distant), Thesiger set out with his Bedu companions on camelback across hundreds of miles of arid, sun-bleached dunes and gravel plains. In certain areas where there were tribal tensions and they could be violently robbed of their camels, they had to be constantly on their guard and prepared to defend themselves, whilst in other areas Thesiger had to be passed off as a fellow Arab otherwise he could easily have been shot for being an infidel Christian.

Pestered by a friend to write about his experiences, he eventually wrote Arabian Sands, which was published in 1959 and is now considered a classic of travel literature. I have just got round to reading it and indeed it is a remarkable memoir. The insights into the lives of the Bedu are profound, and I was certainly taken with a couple of the characters in particular – bin Kalima and bin Ghabaisha – who became hard and fast friends with the man they called Umbarak. This paragraph sums up the sense of satisfaction that Thesiger derived from his experiences:

In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship that was inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction that comes with hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.

This also informs the sense of loss that Thesiger expresses elsewhere when he bemoans the inevitable erosion of traditional Bedouin ways by the march of modernity and the large-scale development beginning to be brought to the region by the American oil companies. How he would have been astonished and dismayed by modern-day Dubai and Abu Dhabi!

Wilfred Thesiger
Arabian Sands book cover
Literature

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

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You could have safely bet that at some point in this series of blogs I was always going to visit a certain trinity of British university dons who have done more for the literary fantasy genre worldwide than, well, any other trinity of university dons. Huge. Immense. The Ronaldo, Messi and Mbappé of children’s fantasy literature – I am talking of course about Lewis Carroll, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. If your bet had been an accumulator you would be quids in, too, because I shall certainly be visiting C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien at some point in the future, but for today let’s look at the grandaddy, that long-time maths professor at Christ Church Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).

Lewis Carroll, what an interesting character! First and foremost, he was a mathematician and long-time university scholar, specialising in geometry, algebra and logic; under his real name, he published eleven books on maths-related subjects. He was also an avid puzzler and is credited with the invention of the “word ladder” – you know it, that puzzle that involves changing one word into another, one letter at a time. He loved word play, amply displayed in his nonsense poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876).

However, it is of course Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) for which Lewis Carroll will be forever remembered. As we all know, it details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole (and boy, don’t we hear that phrase a lot these days: “going down a rabbit hole”?) into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. Carroll first outlined his story whilst out on rowing trips on the Thames near Oxford which he often undertook with members of the Liddell family (Henry Liddell being the Dean at Christ Church).

When he told the story to Henry’s daughter Alice Liddell, she begged him to write it down, which he duly did and then passed the manuscript to another friend and mentor, the novelist George MacDonald. The enthusiasm of the MacDonald children for the story encouraged Carroll to seek publication, and so he approached Macmillan Publishers, who loved it. After the possible alternative titles were rejected – Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour – the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 (followed up of course by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871). The rest, as they say, is history.

The artist John Tenniel provided a brilliant set of wood-engraved illustrations for the book, of which we can see a gallery of some of the universally familiar characters here:

Lewis Carroll
Art

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Kalevala Paintings (1890s)

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Greece has its Iliad and Odyssey, Italy its Aeneid, Portugal its Lusiads, Iceland its Eddas, Germany its Nibelungenlied, Britain its Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, and India its Mahabarata and Ramayana. I am talking of course about national folk-epics, those literary masterpieces that were originally an oral canon of folk-stories percolated down through the mists of time and later written down and integrated into the worldview of its people.

Well, Finland’s was the epic poetry collection known as the Kalevala, which was developed quite late – during the 19th century – but still from ancient traditional folk-tales. The Kalevala was an integral part of the Finns’ national awakening in the era of the Grand Duchy of Finland when they were under the yoke of the Russian empire, and it was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity, ultimately leading to independence from Russia in 1917.

This national awakening coincided with the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art roughly spanning the period 1880 to 1910. The Kalevala provided the artistic inspiration for numerous themes at the time in literature (J. L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål; Aleksis Kivi’s The Seven Brothers), music (Jean Sibelius), architecture (Eliel Saarinen), and of course the visual arts, the most notable of which were provided by one Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

Born Axél Waldemar Gallén in Pori, Finland, to a Swedish-speaking family (he Finnicised his name in 1907), Gallen-Kallela first attended drawing classes at the Finnish Art Society before studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married Mary Slöör in 1890 and on their honeymoon to East Karelia, he started collecting material for his depictions of the Kalevala. He would soon be inextricably linked with the independence movement as he produced his scenes from the old stories.

The most extensive paintings that Gallen-Kallela made of the Kalevala were his frescoes, originally for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, but painted again in 1928 in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki where they can be seen to this day. However, many standalone works exist too; here’s a flavour of his art, though if you want to know what they depict you’ll have to read the Kalevala!

Aleksi Gallen-Kallela
Literature

L M Montgomery’s Anne Of Green Gables (1908)

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Ah, the bookshelf in our classroom during my later years at primary school, I remember it well. Replete with titles and illustrated covers promising tales for children of adventure and derring-do in exotic lands: Robinson Crusoe, King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island. It had all the girls’ classics, too: Black Beauty, Little Women, What Katy Did, Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables. Of course, I never read any of the latter books…until recently, that is, when I finally read L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, having been inspired to do so by watching Netflix’s excellent Canadian TV adaptation, Anne with an E (2017).

The novel was published in 1908 by Canadian author L M Montgomery (Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874-1942). Set in the late 19ᵗʰ century, it recounts the adventures of 11-year-old orphan girl Anne Shirley sent by mistake to two middle-aged siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who run their farm in the close-knit community of Avonlea in Prince Edward Island, Canada. They had planned to adopt a boy who could help them with the farm work and so when Anne arrives, their first instinct is to send her straight back. However, her exuberant pleading persuades them to keep her for a trial period and soon her personality wins them over.

Amybeth McNulty as Anne Shirley in “Anne with an E”

Anne is talkative to the extreme, hugely imaginative, dramatic, an extractor of joy from life wherever it may exist, and a touchstone of youthful idealism, if a little prone to defensiveness over her red hair, freckles and pale complexion. She is also insistent that her name should always be spelt with an “e” at the end, hence the title of the TV adaptation. In this she was played impeccably by Amybeth McNulty, the more so now that I have read the book and see how accurately she nailed the character. The whole series turned out to be a largely faithful rendering of the book and certainly it was a heart-warming depiction of a simple turn-of-the-century lifestyle in rural Canada, well wroth the watch.

Since its publication, Anne of Green Gables has sold more than 50 million copies – that’s actually not far behind J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books albeit having had a century longer to sell copies! And it has that accolade for good reason, so who knows, I may even have to delve into Black Beauty or Heidi next?

Anne of Green Gables, 1st edition book cover
L M Montgomery
Art

John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)

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Last Sunday I popped along to see Monet’s iconic The Water-Lily Pond, on loan at York Art Gallery, and very nice it was too, being the centrepiece of a nice collection of key loans featuring various French en plein air precursors to Impressionism. However, whilst there, I was reminded that the gallery had also recently acquired for its permanent collection a piece by an artist a little closer to home, Leeds-born John Atkinson Grimshaw, known not for the Impressionistic brushwork or garden scenes of Monet and his ilk but for realistic nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. The painting is Liverpool Docks at Night (1870s) and it’s a fine example of Grimshaw’s oeuvre. It was also something of a coup for York Art Gallery, given that it had been accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from a collection and had been allocated to the gallery for the bargainous price of £0.

Grimshaw was born in a back-to-back house in Park Street, Leeds, in 1836, and at first looked destined for a normal, anonymous life –  he married his cousin Frances at age twenty and got a job as clerk for the Great Northern Railway. However, the young John had an artistic gift and an ambition, and it must have taken a great deal of courage and self-belief for him to dismay his parents by packing in his job and launching himself as a painter, but he did just that, in 1861. His primary artistic influence was the Pre-Raphaelites and true to their style he painted with accurate colour and lighting and with vivid detail. Although he did start out painting a variety of genres, Grimshaw was later drawn to depicting moonlit views of city streets in Leeds and London, and dockside scenes in Hull, Liverpool, and Glasgow. James McNeill Whistler, with whom Grimshaw worked later in his career in his Chelsea studios, said: “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures”.

Unlike Whistler’s Impressionistic night scenes, “Grimmy’s” nocturnes were sharply focused and almost photographic in their quality, and there is an eerie warmth about them. Rather than concentrating on the dirty and depressing aspects of industrial life (that he would have had no trouble finding), Grimshaw imbued his paintings with a lyrical evocation of the urban landscape and there is poetry in his captured mists, reflected streetlight in wet pavements, and dark figures wrapped up against the weather. His twilight cities became his “brand” and became very popular with his middle-class patrons; he must have done well because by the 1870s he and his wife were living at Knostrup Old Hall, in the Temple Newsam area of Leeds, a far cry from the back-to-back in Park Street.

Here is a favourite of mine, Boar Lane, Leeds (1881), a street we Leeds dwellers have walked down many a time on a winter’s day like this.

 

Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Film, TV, and Theatre

Spencer Tracy in Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

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The Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley is the oldest indie cinema in Leeds and has been continuously showing films since 1912. As such it is regarded with fondness by much of the north Leeds community and long may it continue. Anyway, it has a classics night every month, where viewers can watch a series of nostalgic ads and previews from back in the day, prior to settling back with a fairly-priced box of popcorn to enjoy a classic movie, selected for its historical, cultural or aesthetic significance. Last month, for example, I went to see Hitchcock’s Rear Window; next month I’m tempted by Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager; and this month I went to see the subject of this blog, John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The term “neo-Western” does not signify a western movie as such, and instead implies the use of certain themes and motifs redolent of westerns but set in more modern times (in this case, 1945). Really, it’s a crime drama but it contains the wide, open plains and desert landscapes of the western, and Spencer Tracy’s “stranger comes to town and is met with unfriendly suspicion” persona is top-drawer Clint Eastwood.

Tracy plays a one-armed stranger, John Macreedy, who disembarks from the train that rarely stops in the isolated desert hamlet of Black Rock and is soon put under hostile scrutiny from the locals who lounge on the wooden verandas of the saloon and bar-and-grill and wonder who the hell this new guy is and what the hell does he want? At this point I should say that if I were harbouring a dark secret – which you can be sure these Black Rock locals certainly are – and a stranger comes to town asking questions, I would put on a friendly and cooperative façade to deflect suspicion. This lot, however, opt for the acute hostility and evasiveness approach and thus come across as guilty as sin from the get-go, with Borgnine and Marvin in particular pushing the envelope in the “I’ve clearly got something to hide” department.

Still, Macreedy’s been asking questions about a certain Japanese-American gentleman named Komoko, but nobody seems to want to engage. Robert Ryan’s character Reno Smith is clearly in charge and holds the rest of the town in his thrall, including the ineffectual, alcoholic sheriff. Smith claims that Komoko was simply interned during World War II but also reveals his virulent anti-Japanese sentiment developed after Pearl Harbor – we the audience are only too aware that something dodgy has gone down and not only that but Macreedy himself needs to be in fear for his own life. Macreedy gradually breaks down the omerta of the townsfolk and begins to separate the real culprits from the simply scared, some of whom are inspired by Macreedy to step up. It’s a tour de force of psychological drama, with great tough-guy dialogue and the stunning backdrop of the Mohave desert, and well worth my punt in venturing out on a Wednesday night!

Let’s watch Macreedy, despite his one arm, getting the better of thug Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine), in this tense encounter.

Spencer Tracy and John Ericson in Bad Day at Black Rock

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