Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, was a native of Sicily, and is I believe the first "modern" (meaning after the Roman Empire) Italian writer we have encountered on the program. He is most famous in this country, to the extent that he is famous at all, for his post-World War I modernist plays, such as this one. The original (to me) plot of this concerns a woman who is a sort of nightclub dancer and live-in companion of a writer in postwar Berlin who has been identified by the visiting agent of a wealthy Italian gentleman as the latter's wife, who has suffered a lapse in memory due to trauma experienced when their villa and the neighborhood was overrun by the invading armies during the war. She accepts the possibility of this, as evidently she has admitted to remembering no past prior to her current situation in her Berlin life either, and goes to live in the villa in Italy, where she reconstructs the persona of the lost wife via letters and diaries and other records that she finds among her possessions, and performs the role so pleasingly and in a sense better than the pre-war person occupying that role ever had, that almost everyone, including her husband, in that milieu, apart from some relatives who stood to inherit the villa if the wife had remained unfound, overcomes their skepticism about her identity and accepts her as the genuine wife. The English title at least is expounded upon in a long speech in the middle act of the play, in which the central female character (who is never named, her part is that of "The Strange Lady" in the text, "The Unknown One" in the list of characters) explains without consuming resentment or bitterness that she retains no personal identity even so far as impressions made upon her senses; these are only projections of what the others would have her experience. "I came here; I gave myself to you utterly, utterly; I said to you: 'Here I am, I am yours; there is nothing left in me of my own. Take me and make me, make me as you desire me!"
Being a play of course, this did not take but a couple of days to read and so I did not have as it were enough time to get immersed in it so that thoughts on it came to me readily. I did find myself saying right away, having been reading a number of modern things during the interval while I was working on the As the Earth Turns essay that there was nothing like the old books. I don't remember what exactly prompted this reaction, but I think it was the overall effect of the calm, deliberate tone of the writing, the emphasis on the means of how language and thought are employed in getting at the problem in the story is the story, and always is in literature-as-art, which this certainly is. Our collective contemporary instinct, us being those who have had some exposure to progressive trends in Western intellectual-artistic circles, is at the very least to wonder if there is not something sinister at hand (on the part of the writer) in the attitude of self-effacement of the main female character and her allowance of projection/direction of her identities by others, the male gaze and so on. I am the product of several layers of conditioning with regard to how I read, and the oldest and most solid one I am guided by is the necessity of accepting literary and artistic works as they are if they have some ring of truth to them, and are interesting. The current fashion for being suspicious of the older male authors in the European tradition having any authority to create female characters that do not adhere to certain guidelines of autonomy, forcefulness and the like has insinuated itself in my thinking as well, though more in the manner of a pest that must be acknowledged than a solid, foundational part of my makeup.
Despite all of the accolades the play supposedly received in the United States, there are not a lot of printed copies of it in circulation. I finally had to settle on a 1957 compilation put out by the Crown publishing house of the Twenty Best European Plays on the American Stage, which seems to be the most recent mainstream publication of As You Desire Me available in this country. It does look like a good collection. It has no other IWE plays in it, but all of the works are by major writers and there are some undisputed classics in it such as No Exit and The Sea Gull that I might read someday. It is one of those books in which the pages consist of two columns of small print and it is also a big book, so it is difficult for me to read presently, when I do not have a large desk to set it open on and a nice green-shaded lamp and quiet calm in which to luxuriate in the words. My reading habit at present is more of the hurried/furtive variety. I only bother to do it to maintain a tenuous contact with that portion of the world I see myself as really belonging to.
Judith Anderson, recognizable from many classic films including Rebecca, Laura and The Ten Commandments, played the role of the Unknown Woman in the original New York production at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on January 28, 1931. Greta Garbo played the role in the 1932 film version, which featured among others Erich von Stroheim as her German writer companion. The star in the original Italian production was a celebrated actress named Marta Abba, who also wrote the English translation that was both performed in New York and printed in my 1957 edition of the play. She lived from 1900-1988, and was notably Pirandello's creative muse from 1925 until his death in 1936. Here she is
Happily, this is not, provided of course that I live long enough, the end of Pirandello on the program, as Six Characters in Search of an Author, considered his masterpiece by many, is also on the list though I won't be getting to the Ss for a long long time.
The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge
This challenge for some reason turned up a great many audio-visual contestants which overwhelmed the few, and mostly obscure, books that entered the contest.
1. West Side Story (movie)...............................................................1,457
2. Footloose (movie)........................................................................1,106
3. Marjane Satrapi--Persepolis...........................................................607
4. Hyde Park on Hudson (movie).......................................................542
5. The Other Sister (movie).................................................................419
6. Toni Braxton--The Heat (record)....................................................335
7. Britney Spears--Circus (record)......................................................330
8. Mordecai Gerstein--The Man Who Walked Between the Towers...156
9. Hazel Gaynor--The Girl From the Savoy........................................145
10. Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Season 7 (TV)).......................109
11. It's Alive (movie).............................................................................65
12. That's Entertainment Part III (movie)............................................50
13. That's Entertainment Part II (movie)..............................................37
14. Moby--South Side (record)..............................................................25
15. Blind Justice (movie).......................................................................21
16. Hercules: Zero to Hero (movie?).....................................................12
The Round of 16
#1 West Side Story over #16 Hercules Zero
#2 Footloose over #15 Blind Justice
#3 Satrapi over #14 Moby
#4 Hyde Park on Hudson over #13 That's Entertainment II
#12 That's Entertainment III over #5 The Other Sister
Based on my personal opinion that The Other Sister looks horrible.
#6 Braxton over #11 It's Alive
#10 Real Housewives over #7 Spears.
#9 Gaynor over #8 Gerstein
As happened the other time only three books qualified the tournament, two of them faced each other in the first round. The Gerstein book was a children's book about Phillippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center roofs. It did win a Caldecott medal though.
Round of 8
#1 West Side Story over #12 That's Entertainment III
#10 Real Housewives over #2 Footloose
#3 Satrapi over #9 Gaynor
The only two books left have a death match in the quarterfinals. The Satrapi is I believe something like a comic book, but it has been pretty celebrated, and would be something of a departure from my usual habits.
#4 Hyde Park on Hudson over #6 Braxton
Final Four of this Grim Tournament
#1 West Side Story over #10 Real Housewives
#3 Satrapi over #4 Hyde Park on Hudson Championship
#3 Satrapi over #1 West Side Story.
One last American novel from the era between the World Wars before we leave this particular turf for a while.
Somewhat forgotten today--I can only find one other blog post about it on an internet search--As the Earth Turns depicts a year (1932, to be precise) in the life of a Maine farming family. It was a great success in its time, finishing as the #2 best-selling novel in the United States for its year (behind only the previously-written-about-here Anthony Adverse!)and inspiring a film adaptation in the next one. It is of especial interest to me perhaps because it is set about 40 miles from where I live now (the author was born in Rochester, N.H. and lived most of her life just across the river in South Berwick, Maine, on which the town of Derwich in the book is presumably based) as well as a similar distance in the other direction from where I lived in Maine as a teenager. As with most of these IWE books, I liked it better than almost anything else I read, if not quite as enthusiastically as my encyclopedia's editors did. These extolled it as "very fine", said that it "richly deserves its great success" and that its "central character, Jen, is an admirable creation." It is a quiet book about ordinary things in particular lives, but it does evoke well the (somewhat incredibly)lost people and way of life that predominated in much of this part of the world eighty years ago--the childhood of my grandparents--and had not entirely disappeared even thirty years ago. But the reader who cares will get a sense of my thoughts and feelings about this book through the many notes I have taken on it which I must get to now.
p. 61 (keeping up my habit on holding off on note-taking until I start to get a feel for the book): "It was the spell the male on the farm had the power of casting over his women when occasion demanded it. The rooster swelled up, stretched his neck, and crowed, when he had done it. The bull threw back his head and roared." What exactly has been done to the men in our time? The absoluteness of the decline on all fronts cannot be explained as easily or contentedly as people seem to want it to be.
p.86 On a farmhouse restored for a soon-to-be-married couple: "Margaret would go inside the house and keep it, while Ed worked for her in the fields." Strict gender roles and the proper carrying out of them are taken very seriously in this book. Carroll is sympathetic towards those weaker or flightier souls who cannot maintain the necessary focus and energy or who are inclined towards a different kind of life. However those who live most in accordance with the ideal are the most exalted characters.
p.115 "Most people nowadays had no time to search the woods and nobody knew the herbs, which to use or where to find them, but went to drug stores, and likely paid a dollar for nothing half so good to clear the blood as thoroughwort." While accurately, and from Carroll's point of view probably lovingly drawn, I admit I find these unwaveringly hard-working and frugal old Yankees kind of tiresome and humorless.
No connection with the book, but this picture kept coming up so why not
p.195 "They interest me. I haven't had much chance to get used to people of another race. Come to think of it, until now there's never been anybody but Yankees around here, except the woodchoppers. That's unusual...You know, Jen, I've never even yet seen a negro in my life! Nor a Chinaman nor a Jap!" This is spoken by Olly. He is the educated one, who is in college. This extreme racial (or non-racial) dynamic was still the case here until very recently. Certainly it was that way when I lived in Maine in the 80s and even in the late 90s in New Hampshire seeing a nonwhite person more than once a week was still a rarity. The nonwhite population of these states even now are only around 5%, but that is a substantial increase from 0.2, which is what they were up to about twenty years ago.
p.196 More on this topic of non-Yankee people, referencing an exotic family of Poles that has settled in the neighborhood, the consideration of whom brought up the subject in the first place: "They plowed and planted and drove past the edge of the lane every day. Their baby had the croup and their children went to school with George's and the Forrests and the rest. There was nothing in that to make anybody think of Chinamen and negroes and give himself the shivers."
p. 219. On the patriarch and master Maine farmer of the story: "For Mark Shaw the country outside of Derwich was shut off by hills he could never see over, and the language there was one he could not use; unless the children were at home they were 'away', and more than that, switchboards, airports, colleges, bosses, salaries, courses, he could not grasp; thinking of it bewildered him."
p. 242 Romance, Yankee style: "He liked the sound of her voice. He liked the way her hair shone and her hands moved. He sat watching her. 'One man alone can't get ahead fast, though, on a place like mine that needs so much done to it.' 'Not fast,' Jen agreed."
Jen, who is nineteen and more or less has not stopped working and cooking and keeping the house in perfect order since her mother died when she was ten, is the heroine of the story. She came off to me in the reading as a grim, humorless, judgmental person giving off something of a lesbian vibe, though I really don't think homosexuality among these types of characters would have been on Carroll's radar in the early 1930s. I think we are supposed to think that she cooks and works endlessly out of love or effusive self-expression, but she seems to be more of an inflexible adherent to duty, for whom pleasure independent of that fulfillment does not even exist.
p. 246 Regarding the Polish boy who is determined to stay and make the farm work even when his parents have given it up (and who is in love with Jen): (Mark) "As I see it, it'll show what he is. What he does." (Jen) "Yes. It's a matter for judgment."
Obviously this sort of judgment is still cast now in other forms, but the severity here seems a bit much.
As with Margaret Landon, whom I wrote about around this time last year, when Gladys Hasty Carroll died in York, Maine on April 1, 1999 at the age of 94, I was probably in the vicinity, as that is only about 55 miles or so from here and we go to the beach there at least 3-4 times every summer. I don't know what I did that day, as it was a Thursday, and I was off on Thursdays in those days, but my wife would have had to work, so I was probably home, and I probably spent most of the day writing, as that was before my children were born and that was when I making whatever push I could be said to have made in that area. It is sad, other than the children very little has changed in my personal life since 1999. I was already married then, I lived in the same house and already had the same job that I have now. I have become smarter about some things I am sure but so has everyone else. My expression is not much more incisive or arresting than it was then, and my writing at least has declined a lot.
p. 278 "Jen and her father stood by with pleasant faces, non-committal. They had neither time nor money for a fair, nor wish to mix themselves with crowds and noise and skin-games going on." Continuing the theme that work is the only way to get/earn anything in this life. George, the brother who is inept at running his farm and is forever in debt and various financial distresses who blew off a day of work to spend money he didn't have at the fair, is the forerunner of the helpless modern man so familiar to us.
p.312-313 George again. "As a boy he had once shot a deer and this one triumph teased his memory in the fall until he left everything to try again, though deer were few and his aim not of the best." Times have changed. With regard to the deer population I mean.
The writing gets a bit mawkish at the end.
With all of the emphasis in the book on making sure young people hit their teenage years ready to work and otherwise pull their weight I realized that aside from the setting of the book taking place in a farm community the overall demographic situation, which was that that prevailed in most times and places, required young people to be ready to assume mature roles at young ages with an urgency that simply does not exist today, where most people in their twenties are superfluous to the economy and the organization of society. There are very few people in this book who are much over sixty. Mark Shaw, who is the patriarch and village elder of the book, is identified as being fifty-two. In any event they are outnumbered by a factor of five or six by the under-thirties, as was generally the case in reality, whereas with us there are actually more people alive in the 50-70 age cohorts than in those from 30-50, and about equal to those currently in their 20s. The point being that all the lamenting about young people failing to take on the markers and responsibilities of full blown adults is tied in with there not being any real necessity, and less room, for them to seriously do this given the current distribution of population and economic resources/power among various age groups.
As noted above, this will be our last old American book for at least a little while, as none of the next five items on the list fit this description, though they all look to be pretty short (2 plays and 3 poems), so maybe I'll be back in this genre before the end of the summer. I haven't looked beyond these next five for now.
Last year at this time I was very emotional and probably mildly depressed. For some reason my oldest child's graduating from 8th grade and my oldest daughter's finishing preschool were a very great deal to me. My second son, who has also gone to the school for 8 years, is graduating from it next week, and it does not seem to be arousing the same cathartic emotion in anyone, including me, though I still think of it as a big deal, and it has been as huge a part of his life as it was for his brother. For whatever reason I seem to be calmer and in a better overall frame of mind this year, despite the election and the impending decline/collapse of everything that is supposed to be following upon it.
The Challenge
Once again a very small field despite what I thought was a strong group of keywords. I begin to suspect that the Internets have figured out my scheme.
1. A Douglas Stone--Einstein and the Quantum......................................................78
2. Lisa Miller--The Spiritual Child...........................................................................63
3. John A. Farrell--Richard Nixon: The Life............................................................47
4. Ryan Berg--No House to Call My Home..............................................................20
5. Ben Jonson--Bartholomew Fair.............................................................................5
6. Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery............................................................................4
7. A Violin's Life: Music For the Lipinski Stradivari (record)...................................3
8. Kelsey Neilson--Coolibah Creek...........................................................................2
9. Dario Castello--Sonate: Concertate in Stil Moderno, Libra Primo (record).........2
10. Craig Morrison, PhD--American Popular Music: Rock n' Roll...........................1
Qualifying Round
#10 Morrison over #7 A Violin's Life
A mild upset in that I didn't expect any libraries to carry a copy of the Morrison book. But one did.
#9 Castello over #8 Neilson.
The Castello appears to be a distinguished record.
Quarterfinals
#1 Stone over #10 Morrison
#2 Miller over #9 Castello
#3 Farrell over #6 Mrs Beaton
#5 Jonson over #4 Berg
The surprise here was that Berg couldn't break into any libraries.
Semifinals
#1 Stone over #5 Jonson
Two reasons for this choice, despite the Jonson being much shorter and probably the greater work of literature: In the first place I have already read a lot of things like Jonson, including several works by Johnson himself for this list. Second, one of the main purposes of the creation of the Challenge was to get more popular non-fiction into my routine, and I seem to have been getting away from that as late. In short the Stone is the sort of book I invented this game for.
#2 Miller over #3 Farrell
It came down to 374 pages versus 737.
Championship
#1 Stone over #2 Miller
Stone seems a more likely candidate to hold my interest. A pretty clean tournament this time. The two books in the final were evenly matched in terms of size and publication dates. It is probably a bland generalist of book but I am kind of in the mood for something like that. (addendum--as noted in the monthly update, I am already well into this book, which is not bland nor especially generalist, unless the knowledge of math and physics somewhat above the usual high school level is more widespread than we have been led to believe. I have enjoyed it, though it requires a lot of effort (for me) to try to keep up with the scientific concepts as best as I can, and I am kind of exhausted by it.
The author discusses the book. I should watch it myself.
A List--The Arabian Nights............................................473/823 B List--Between books C List--A Douglas Stone, Einstein and the Quantum....215/294
It's taking me a long time to get my report on As the Earth Turns up, which has caused a stall in the B-list. The Arabian Nights continues to be what thought of it in the previous update. Many of the stories are charming enough, others don't hold my interest so much. I usually know by the end of the first page whether it is a story I am going to take to or not. These tales are not such as can overcome a sluggish beginning. I have just gotten through all seven of the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.
Perhaps surprisingly I am enjoying the Einstein book even though about half of the writing is devoted to the problems of quantum physics. I generally neglected my science studies during my youth, which I regret somewhat, not that I could ever have pursued any kind of professional career in that area, but because I think I could have learned more about it than I did. I won't claim that I am following the matters under discussion here with any very competent understanding--I have a general idea of the concepts that Einstein sought to elucidate. Most of the equations make some sense to me when they are written out and I am staring at them on the page, but I could not begin at this point of my life to remember them or keep them straight without dedicating the greater part of my mental energies to the task. Of course these are not easy ideas even for very brilliant people. We studied some Einstein at school, mainly the relativity theory I think--my efforts at that time were poor--and I remember somehow having the idea that when all of this was first rolled out, all of the truly intelligent people, such as the faculty at my college would have been if they had lived 100 years earlier, recognized and appreciated its brilliance and correctness right away, and if Einstein himself were to wander into the classroom they would have to able to question him as near intellectual equals. In truth it took some time, as in many years, even for many top scientists, Nobel Prize winners in some instances, to grasp Einstein's work on relativity and quantum/atomic physics. The heads of physics departments at prestigious universities in Europe returned the relativity papers submitted by the position seeking Einstein declaring without any idea of having shame that they couldn't understand a word of what he was trying to say. The point is, it is difficult and decidedly non-intuitive stuff for most people, even those of some respectable level of education.
A. Douglas Stone is a professor of Physics at Princeton, by the way.
