Monthly Archives: May 2024

Critical Madness: Did Branwell Write “Wuthering Heights”?

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The Heritage Press edition of Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte’s Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights, shocked readers when it was published in 1847. The violence and brutal revenge plot continue to shock readers.  Emily wrote under the male pseudonym, Ellis Currer, which theoretically facilitated publication and sales, but did not shield her from critics’ and readers’ outrage.

Some Victorian critics esteemed Wuthering Heights, others hated it.  I think of Bronte as a predecessor of D. H. Lawrence, whose wild, sometimes violent novel, Women in Love, was banned in 1920. (Gudrun’s violence is as great or greater than Heathcliff’s.) Emily’s most ardent admirer in the 19th century was the novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward, who claimed that Emily was a better writer than Charlotte. 

Emily might have been shocked, however, to learn that, though her work was embraced in the twentieth century, some (mostly male) critics believed that she had not written her own novel.  In other words, it was too brilliant and too disturbing to be the conception of a rector’s spinster daughter. Some critics believed that Charlotte had written it; others believed that their brother, Branwell, an alcoholic and drug user, was the author. These speculations were debunked before my time, but I recently reread the 1942 Heritage Press edition of Wuthering Heights, and in the introductory essay, “How This Book Came to Be,” .John T. Winterich considers these issues seriously.

What would Emily Bronte have thought?  I picture her walking on the moors, growling, “I’m done with publishing.”  Winterich favors the theory that Branwell may not have written the novel but probably contributed to it. There is no evidence that Branwell wrote any of it, aside from the gossip of three of Branwell’s friends, who claimed he did.  The boys’ club tried to appropriate the best for its own -perhaps while drinking. 

As a common reader, I’m a great fan of Wuthering Heights. It can be read on many levels:  as a romance about twin souls; as a prototype of monstrous, unhappy, destructive love; or as a classic of obsessive love and narcissism which shatters not only the lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, but the lives of their respective spouses and children.

Structured as a double frame story, it is narrated by Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s tenant at the Grange, who repeats the story of Wuthering Heights, as told by Nelly, his housekeeper and the former housekeeper at Wuthering Heights. 

The tragedy begins with the intrusion of a stranger.  On a dark, stormy night,  Mr. Earnshaw, the father of Catherine and Hindley, returns from London with a dark, dirty orphan boy under his coat, instead of the gifts for his children.  Jealous Hindley hates Heathcliff on sight, but Catherine and Heathcliff become as close as brother and sister, and then even best friends, and roam the moors wildly. They fall in love in adolescence, but after Mr. Earhshaw dies,.Hindley banishes Heathcliff to the stables. Catherine decides to marry a neigbor, gentle, rich Edgar Linton, whom I viewed contemptuously as “a milksop” on my first reading long ago.

Why, why, why would she marry Linton when she was in love with Heathcliff?  At a book club, the Why’s and Why Not’s among us were equally divided.  The Why’s were romantic and blamed Catherine for deserting Heathcliff; the Why Not’s were practical and thought Catherine should have a comfortable life. I can see it both ways though I blame Catherine’s selfishness for Heathcliff’s transformation. They were twin souls: they should have stayed together!

Catherine is not untroubled about the love question, and, unaware that Heathcliff is in the next room, she explains her qualms to Nelly:  “If I were in heaven, I should be intensely miserable.”

And she continues:

I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth and the angels were so angry that they flung me into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.  That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other.  I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him.

This is my favorite speech in literature, and I shall leave you to ponder it and read or reread Wuthering Heights, one of the most beautifully-written novels of the 19th century.

The Writer’s Life, Part 2

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In my last post, “The Writer’s Life:  The Summer Writers’ Conference,” I described the culture of a Summer Writers’ Conference.  The teaching methods were not perfect, but the conference launched my career as “a literary journalist.” 

Me, many years ago, with a writer-ish look.

It began with what I called “an accidental book review.” Snoozing over the reviews in the local Sunday paper, I thought, “I can do this.” And so I reviewed Alice Adams’s collection of short stories, After You’ve Gone, and submitted it to a small literary journal in California.  I got an acceptance letter, and the editor gave me another assignment.  Oh, by the way, the journal did not pay money, but free books and copies of the magazine.  Who cared? It was a joy.

I used to haunt a second-hand bookstore that carried obscure little magazines and journals. I copied down lists of editors and addresses and sent off my queries.  Hell, yes, they always said.  They were pleased to have an eclectic volunteer who would read anything:  one editor called me Nanook of the North because I lived in a cold northern city.   “Nanook, it’s me.  How do you feel about Frederick Exley?”   I was also briefly a “niche” small press reviewer for another literary journal.  Nobody wanted to review small press books:  they were uneven and often unsatisfactory.  But I remember reviewing Nervous Conditions, by the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, before it was published by a large publishing company and won the Commonwealth Award.  She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022.

I love writing essays, too.  I have written about Oprah’s Book Club, reading on mass transit, literary awards, the rising respectability of science fiction, and the career of Elizabeth Wurtzel. And one summer, when my husband and I were in Toronto, we were excited to hear that The Rolling Stones were in town rehearsing for a new tour.  The  Toronto Star published daily articles about “Mick Jagger sightings”:  at midnight or later someone always saw Jagger at a  club or restaurant.  And so I wrote a goofy essay called “Waiting for Mick Jagger.” My husband and I saw no Stones anywhere: I listed tourist spots where the Stones were not. They were not at World’s Biggest Bookstore, nor  at the Market (perhaps The Lawrence Market, I’m no sure), nor at the top of the CN Tower (once the world’s tallest building), nor Cabbagetown, the oldest neighborhood in Toronto, nor at Niagara Falls, which is always nicest on the Canadian side.  I wish I still had this essay. Alas, my cat, Zany, shredded it with  other papers in a box.  But we couldn’t be mad at Zany.

“Clever cat!”

I most often write about bookish subjects.  I have written about book prizes, Goodreads, book clubs, and the pros and cons of shopping at Abebooks  I have been paid something for most of my essays, or should I say underpaid?  Because as Rome falls, or rather, as the newspapers and magazines cut back, and longtime employees trail into into the world to work at low-paying non-union jobs, the newspapers have become what one friend describes as “a blood bath.”  It’s like the fall of Rome:   The emperors provide less and less for  the slaves and freedman (freelancers) even as the cost of living rises and they take more for themselves.

But there’s always fiction…    

The Writer’s Life: The Summer Writers’ Conference

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One day a thick, elegant brochure arrived in the mail.  It invited me to apply to a Summer Writers’ Conference.   

My name was doubtless on the list because I subscribed to Poets & Writers, but I was interested.  For years I had written stories, sent them hither and thither, and collected rejection letters. I kept any notes that offered even slight encouragement, though “Nicely written, but I want something, anything, to happen,” probably did not belong. 

Many American universities offer Summer Writers’ Conferences.  It is a big business:  one large state university offers a succession of one- and two-week-long workshops continuously throughout the summer.  I attended a more typical small conference, with two fiction workshops and two poetry workshops in the same two- week period. 

I worked hard on the short story I submitted to the conference.  It was set in a run-down urban neighborhood, which the snobbish heroine hates.  In one scene, an immigrant family leads a goat down the street. She wonders:  Was it for milk, or was it a pet? In another scene, she marches out to the alley in pajamas to tell the drug addicts to take their crack-cocaine party elsewhere so she can sleep. She is the only one who is not surprised when they obey her.  In the end, she considers moving home to work as an adjunct, but stays when she learns she is pregnant.

My husband and I thought it was the best story I wrote.  The professor trashed it and said it could only be published in a feminist magazine.  I burst into tears and was not much like a feminist, I fear. Heavens, it was harsh criticism to give an amateur writer who was basically at summer camp.

Despite the bad start, I got a lot out of the conference.   My fellow writers were mellow and encouraging, and I kept in touch with some of them for years.  Some of us were there  to improve our craft, others wanted to learn how to get published.  The professor may have disappointed some when he said he didn’t have an agent but sent out his stories himself. When one came back, he sent it immediately to another magazine.  He had published thousands of stories, mostly in little magazines. 

We learned to write spare prose in two-and-a-half page stories. He praised two of my my stories, especially the last one, which he kindly swore was publishable.  And he corresponded with ALL of us by postcard after the conference. He must have dashed off hundreds of postcards every day in addition to typing his stories. To the end of his life, he wrote on a typewriter, a Luddite to the last.

You wonder:  What happened after the conference?  Did she publish?

Does that matter? First, let me share what I learned at the conference.  Delete all adjectives and adverbs. In other words, write  like a journalist.  Your writing will improve.

Do as he said, not as I do.  I use too many adjectives and adverbs.

The Green Plains Blues, or How to Survive a Women’s Dance

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Betty Friedan, my feminist idol , the one who started it all (center, bottom row).

“Green Plains has always been a death trip,” said a tragic, pallid lesbian I recalled from a women’s dance, or was it a womyns’ dance?, one of the most boring events of my adolescence.

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

I wanted to tell her, You’ll be happier if you stay away from them.  But you can’t say that to a lesbian, can you?

The radical lesbians in Green Plains were not a merry bunch, and, indeed, if I had spent more time with them, it might have been a death trip for me, too. Humor was not their strong suit:  Betty Friedan was too comical. “Why are we laughing at ourselves?” asked a lesbian at a lecture by Friedan at the Student Union.  I wanted to apologize to Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and one of my heroines, but she was used to handling such people and did fine on her own.

The women’s dance was a peculiar rite in Green Plains.  First, the fashion:  drag, not Laura Ashley or Coco Chanel.  Dressed in men’s suits, like the dykes of earlier decades, I suppose as a homage to gay rights activism, or the Revolution – though what men’s suits had to do with it I could not say – they also had identical home-cut (think Covid) short haircuts, which gave them a smart dash of military chic.

And yet you had to be there in that cold hall above a store – the thermostat was set at 30 or 40 – to understand that the dance was potentially fun, but mostly an exercise to vanquish the cold.

Now I don’t want to be unkind.  I have no ill feeling toward gay, or queer, or bisexual, or trans, or non-binary people, or others.  But I found these women too earnest: they belonged to radical collectives that were constantly arguing politics and at the same time trying to root out agents who infiltrated their groups. They had little to worry about: since we teenagers knew everything, the agents would not have had to work too hard.

“We thought there was going to be a revolution,” one of these women was quoted as saying in a newspaper article a few years back.

We know!

None of these radical lesbians, to my knowledge, had an interest in seducing/statutory-raping teenage girls, except for the one who groomed/ preyed on me.  I was her Teenage Girl # 2, and she had a most peculiar pick-up line.  After taking me out for coffee (read cocoa) when I was a 16-year-old waif who did not live with her parents, she lent me a copy of Anne Sexton’s poems, then called me on the phone, then wept because she said I must have read her marginal notes and figured out that she was gay.

This was pessimistic (or optimistic?) on her part, because I had not opened the book, and would not have read the marginal notes if I had.  I had no interest in reading what I learned later MAY HAVE BEEN THE ONLY BOOK SHE HAD EVER READ. 

Those who read this blog will know that I loathe scrawled notes in books.  I recently blacklisted an online bookseller who sold me a “very good” copy of Angelica Gordischer’s SF novel, Kalpa Imperial, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, covered with unintelligible notes on almost every page. 

I had coffee with her –then she introduced me to bagels. A couple of weeks later I was established in her house, because she SAID she was in love with me, and this would be my home… FOREVER.  She said that I was so special, so talented, so brilliant… all the things we like to hear.

It was a strange relationship. I lived with her for a year and a half and really do not remember any activities we shared.   We didn’t take walks, we didn’t ride our bicycles, we didn’t listen to The Band, we didn’t hang glittered tampons on trees in people’s yards – activities I had formerly enjoyed. She was in her thirties, I was an immature child.

Soon I felt isolated. She discouraged me from seeing my friends. I couldn’t tell ANYONE about the relationship except three approved friends, one of whom was gay, in case somebody ratted her out and she had to go to jail for statutory rape.  I still saw my friends from time to time, but it was increasingly difficult to get away, and when she was there all we did was sit around. 

And I felt depressed at school, because I was afraid to say almost ANYTHING.  While I was treating a yeast infection with yogurt, a home remedy that did not work, or glumly reading the latest revolutionary newspaper (how I longed to be a suburban housewife!),  other students were presumably living normal lives.  I was in a secret two-woman collective where if I didn’t pretend to be 18 she would go to PRISON. 

I attended school less and less. My German teacher yelled when she saw me outside,  “If you don’t start coming to class you’re going to fail!” She was well-meaning, and she was right:  I used to be on the Honor Roll, and missed teachers’ approval.  But then she said if I didn’t find anything interesting in high school, I wouldn’t find anything interesting in life.  And that’s how she lost me.  To make it up to her, though, I took German in college.

Sometimes I caught bad colds and stayed home all day crying. I did have a lot to cry about.  “My lesbian lover” had suggested that we piss on each other during sex.  She claimed that she and Girl #1 had loved it. I firmly said No.  It was so degrading, I was indignant that ANYONE would speak of such a thing to me. 

There was also a road trip where I had to pretend to her family that I was 18.  Her brother, a professor in Illinois, slammed out of the room when she introduced me with my fake age (“Oh, by the way she’s 18!)” and he would not speak to her for the day or two we were there.  His wife and two daughters were very nice.  But this experience made me numb.  I was there, in the background, but why? What was she trying to prove?  Could it be that only an underage lover would accept her?  These things flashed across my mind, as she paraded me across the country, sometimes introducing me as her girlfriend, other times as a friend.  I learned on this trip that she came from an upper-middle-class family, well, perhaps upper-class, I’m not sure, but I was surprised by their big house, where I stayed in the basement.

 And then I was at the university, and I was loving Jane Austen’s Emma and the Greek tragedians, and I left her… and I made heterosexual friends…  got married…  and am very happy with my husband, whom I admire more than anybody.

And below are THE SIX SIGNS OF UNHIPNESS, i.e., HIPSTER INCOMPATIBILITY, which will help you decide if a person is right for you. The six signs of unhipness are in italics.

1.  Polyester pantsuits.  If it isn’t cotton or wool, you probably shouldn’t wear it, because it’s essentially plastic, burning fossil fuels, but they never know that. Polyester used to be much stodgier than it is now, and since the material doesn’t breathe, it causes B.O.  Really. 

2.  Electric blanket.  You do not need an electric blanket.  You can pile up a bunch of blankets that you do not have to plug in the wall.  Also, you won’t get electrocuted.  I feared the house would catch on fire.

3.  Melanie.  Normal people listened to The Band, George Harrison, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, etc. If there is a Melanie album in the house, get out of there!

4.  Shoplifting books.  It is probably not your dream to go on a shoplifting date at a bookstore.  You are supporting the book trade single-handedly by buying books, or so it seems, and if you Steal This Book, as Abbie Hoffman titled his book, you are betraying books, writers, the book trade, the whole literary establishment.  Turn down the damned date.

5. “Love the One You’re with.” If you find yourself singing Stephen Stills’ greatest hit, leave the relationship immediately.  I did try to convince myself that I should stay because of this song.  That’s how  pathetic I was as a teenager.

And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you’re with
Love the one you’re with
Love the one you’re with
Love the one you’re with

6.  Hissing at the movies.  If your thirtysomething lover hisses at a heterosexual couple in a movie theater because they are kissing and she cannot, because she will go to jail, and everyone turns around and frowns,  LEAVE IMMEDIATELY.  Because the hetero woman will march up the aisle, confront her, tell her she is married and can do as she wants, and tell the hisser that she isn’t very attractive and…  All true, alas..  I slid down in my seat with shame and pretended I was not with her. 

Rosamond Lehmann’s “A Note in Music” (1930)

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If all the people could get drenched through with sunlight once, the expression of their faces would be different ever after.  But there’s never enough. – Rosamond Lehmann’s A Note in Music

I almost didn’t make it through my second reading of this sad novel.

Lehmann’s A Note in Music (1930) is perhaps her most exquisite book.  There are beautifully evocative descriptions of nature, witty and earnest dialogue, and the busy, busy thoughts of unhappy people, especially married women.   

Lack of love is the main theme. Marriage is not synonymous with love for Grace or her friend Norah, who no longer love their husbands, if they ever did. Delicate, sickly Grace, who enjoys books and long walks, is bored by the town and her husband, Tom, a staid businessman. Often he takes her to the cinema.  But, as she confides in Norah, she would have married anyone in the state she was in after Jimmy, her boyfriend, died in the war.  And she associates her marriage with memories of her stillborn baby with the cord wound three times around the neck, a puppy who died, and the lack of light in the northern provincial town where they live.      

She strikes out for independence by taking a trip alone to the country. The trip rejuvenates her. Here, Lehmann’s prose is part Romantic, part Proustian, with long passages of ecstatic stream-of consciousness.  A  phrase repeats throughout the book, “a note in music.”  .

Here is its first appearance.

A row of hollyhocks bloomed against the fruit wall at the end of the garden.  She fancied that their round heads were notes of music painted upon an outspread scroll; chords and scales splashed down in tones of rose and crimson upon the green keyboard of the espalier.  Soon, she thought, in the present heightening and harmony of the interplay of all her senses, they would strike audibly upon her ears.

And the note of music, which recurs again and again, stands for so many things that are both beautiful and difficult. 

Rosamond Lehmann

Some scenes remind me of The Forsyte Saga, especially those which focus on Grace’s husband Tom.  Like Soames, the stuffy businessman whose wife is repulsed by him, Tom is annoyed by the new generation of workers at the office. Tom “shook his head, seeing the old order changing, and the direction of the firm passing from the venerable hands that had shaped it, and bullied it, and won its name and fame…”

Misery dominates the middle-class marriages. In addition to Grace,  there is buoyant Norah, the busy mother of two sons, who does not love her husband, Gerald, an unsociable professor.  She is lost; she can’t think of how to spend her time; so she keeps busy with charity work, Norah looks down on Grace’s languishing, but is sad that they have not become closer friends.

The only well-beloved character in A Note in Music is Hugh, a delightful closeted gay man to whom both Grace and Norah gravitate. Grace is in love with him. Even a beautiful prostitute named Pansy stalks him, because he was so kind to her. And no one understands that he is gay. It is as if they do not know about homosexuality. (Perhaps they don’t.) He is quietly obsessed with Oliver, a bohemian man who sent him poetry books but no longer returns his letters. Now his sister Clare, a glamorous, careless, rich woman of the 1920s, is the only person he loves.

What do we learn from Lehmann?  The rich are careless, and the married middle-class is unromantic.  Their trips to the cinema emphasize the importance of romance. But to Lehmann we wonder if she lost the romantic fever.

The person we worry about most is Grace.  Will she survive her loneliness and losses?

Jerome K. Jerome Bicycles with Pals in  “Three Men on the Bummel”

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I recently read two delightful comic travel novels by Jerome K. Jerome, a popular 19th-century writer, journalist, essayist, novelist, and playwright.  Laughing at his books in an empty house had an eerie, manic sound. Worse, it was really chuckling, and I hate chuckling. That throaty chuckle reminds me of an actress who introduces late -night horror movies, often Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein.   

For those who prefer comedy, I recommend Three Men on a Boat (1889), a riotously funny book about a boat trip on the River Thames.  Jerome sets out with two bachelor friends, Harris and George, none of the three expert boaters, and a dog, Montmorency, who loves fighting with other dogs.  Alas, the three men did not practice their camping technique; their packing and unpacking is a disaster, with necessary items forgotten or lost;  and they have no idea how to erect the special tent t which drapes over the boat; and when they attempt to sail, they become so entangled in the sails that they barely avert disaster.

I laughed even harder at Jerome’s later book,  Three Men on the Bummel (1900). In this account of a hilarious bicycle journey, Jerome and Harris are keen on escaping the annual vacation with their wives and kids, and decide to take a long-distance bicycle trip, a bummel (which means a roaming or wandering) through Germany.  As for George, still a bachelor, he is always ready for a fun trip.  And I laughed at their bumbling, because I once took a harrowing three-state bike ride. My husband is an expert who made me practice camping beforehand, but he still had to lure me up hills in Pennsylvania (mountains, I prefer to call them) with a reward of a cookie or bubble gum.

Much of the humor in Three Men on the Bummel reflects Jerome’s sardonic attitude toward his friends’ preparations.  George has a hilarious German phrase book which makes no sense, and resembles the university German conversation book in Intensive German I.

Jerome describes a typical weird phrasebook situation. In a railroad “compartment load of quarrelsome and ill-mannered lunatics:  “Can you not get further away from me, Sir?” – “It is impossible, madam, my neighbor here is very stout. “ – ”Shall we not endeavor to arrange our legs?”

Illustration from Folio Society edition of Three Men on the Bummel

Then there are the fanatics who like to overhaul bikes. Jerome says there are “two ways you can get exercise out of a bicycle:  you can ride it or you can overhaul it.” He watches with fascination as a friend destroys Jerome’s wheels and chain in the process of overhauling the bike.

Jerome writes,

On the whole I am not sure that that a man who takes his pleasure overhauling does not have the best of the bargain.  He is independent of the weather and the wind; the state of the road troubles him not.  Give him a screw-hammer, a bundle of rags, an oil can, and something to sit down upon, and he is happy for the day.  He has to put up with certain disadvantages, of course; there is no joy without alloy. He himself always looks like  a tinker, and his machine always suggests the idea that, having stolen it he has tried to disguise it…

I love Jerome’s witty philosophizing and satire, and the journey is comically realistic.   Two splendid books, and at least one to add to your summer reading, depending on whether you are a boater or a bicyclist.

The Meaning of “Boogie”:  “Ball of Fire,” a Screwball Comedy

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Here’s what I know. It’s fate. It has to be. In the 1941 classic film, Ball of Fire, Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper play a mismatched couple.  And yet they fall in love. How could it be otherwise? How could Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck), a charming night club singer, not fall for Bertram Potts (Cooper), a serious linguistics scholar who is “investigating” slang for an encyclopedia article.   

And how can he not yearn for Sugarpuss O’Shea, who teaches him to loosen up and boogie while she is more or less on the lam.  She teaches him slang like “corny” and” “slaphappy.” More important, she teaches him what “yum-yum” means.  (More about that later.)

Have you ever heard of this film?  Well, I had not. It’s one of the joys of YouTube, discovering old moves with great actors and brilliant scripts, films that were probably stuck in the equivalent of card catalogues until somebody rediscovered or decided to release them.

And, yes, it is the best movie I’ve seen this year.  One can hardly count Dune 2 as a movie, which I did see in a theater.

I am a fan of Barbara Stanwyck.  I believe my mother imitated her hairdo for several years.  But the only Barbara Stanwyck film I have seen besides Ball of Fire is Christmas in Connecticut, based loosely on Gladys Taber’s columns about country life.  Barbara Stanwyck plays a New York columnist who writes about the country without actually living there.  Charming, funny, and I watch it even when it’s not Christmas.

In Ball of Fire, the encyclopedists charm us with their air of smart bafflement. Professor Potts is a staid grammarian who, with seven aging bachelor scholar assistants, referred to flippantly as “the seven dwarfs,”  has been working for several years on an encyclopedia.  Everything is timed: their daily exercise, meals, work, and they go to bed at 9. Some of them sigh and wish they could stay up later.

In the dusty, book-lined room where they work, with tall piles of books on the floor and papers everywhere, the scholars are up to volume S, and, as Potts says with a gleam in his eye, “Only three years left!”  He tells their housekeeper, “The only crime you’ve committed is a split infinitive.” Others babble about Cleopatra and herbs.

But after a conversation with a garbage man, Professor Potts realizes he has approached his article on slang all wrong, spending hours in reference books but none with the common man.  Soon he is making friends with the garbage man, talking to the newspaper boy, and organizing an informal daily seminar with working-class guys who teach him slang.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is matches-scene-ball-of-fire.jpg
Playing with matches, Stanwyck and Gene Krupa

And then he sees Sugarpuss perform at the club.  As she sings “Drum Boogie” and sedately wiggles her bare midriff in an otherwise fairly modest metallic dress, he hears a jazz band for the first time.  It is utterly enthralling when Sugarpuss and the famous drummer Gene Krupa gather with fans around a table so she can sing and he can drum with matches, light up with the last one. And the audience sings along, and even the fascinated professor calls out “Boogie,” though not quite at the right time.

Professor Potts visits Sugarpuss backstage and gives her his card, but she shoos him away: she is not interested in talking to a bore about slang.  But when she has to go on the lam, because the police are looking to subpoena her, since her gangster boyfriend has committed a murder , though she truly knows nothing about the crimr, she holes up with the encyclopedists.  And is there anything funnier than the elderly professors trying to learn the Boogie with diagrams on the floor?  She shows them how to do it while laughing at the diagram, and a funnier scene I’ve never seen.

Stanwyck was nominated for an Academy Award for this film, and too bad she didn’t win!  Nevertheless, she had many good roles – she was even brilliant in a Western TV show, Bonanza,  I think. Cooper is brilliant as the humorless handsome guy who falls in love with a smart gal who is in a LOTTA trouble! Oh, and she calls him “Pottsie.”

But after she teaches him the yum-yum (kissing), they fall desperately in love. But there are a few misadventures.

All’s well that ends well.

Five stars out of five stars out of five stars… endlessly.

“Three Men in a Boat”: Jerome K. Jerome on Camping & Boating 

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If you have not read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, pack it in your backpack this summer.  Peruse it in the Michigan Woods, or on a white water rafting vacation, or Yellowstone Park – wherever.  But don’t read it while you are drinking aperitifs in a cafe, because your laughter will send the drink fizzing out of your nostrils. And don’t read it at your posh relatives’ elegant McMansion, because they will press all the posh new literary novels and biographies on you, and not understand your silly book.

Three Men in a Boat is an English classic, published in 1889, so it doesn’t come up in conversation much anymore . In this comic travel novel, Jerome K. Jerome, the author and narrator, decides to go boating with his two hypochondriac friends, for the sake of their health, and brings the dog. And, if I may say so, their adventures are often what used to be called “madcap.”

The guys ponder the question of camping vs. hotels.

Should we ‘camp out’ or sleep at inns?” 

George and I were for camping out.  It would be so wild and free, so patriarchal like.

The first night is dreadful. They hadn’t counted on heavy rain.

Illustration by Peter Woolcock

[The tent] is soaked and heavy, and it flops about, and tumbles down on you, and clings round your head and makes you mad. The rain is pouring steadily all the time.  It is difficult enough to fix a tent in dry weather; in wet, the task becomes herculean.  Instead of helping you, it seems to you that the other man is simply playing the fool.  Just as you get your side beautifully fixed, he gives it a hoist from his end and spoils it all.

“Here! What are you up to?” you call out.

“What are you up to?” he retorts. “Leggo, can’t you?”

“Don’t pull it; you’ve got it all wrong, you stupid ass!” you shout.

And on and on. Finally they get the tent up. 

Rainwater is the chief article of diet at supper.  The bread is two-thirds rainwater, the beefsteak pie is exceedingly rich in it, and the jam, and the butter, and the salt, and the coffee have all combined with it to make soup.

They do get the hang of boating and camping, eventually.

Left: Taken in a photo machine of spouse and me on the boardwalk, during a break from camping, (late 80s).

We go camping, and sometimes enjoy it. Some people are natural campers, some are not. Each day of primitive camping (pit toilets, no showers, perhaps a trickle of water from a single faucet, but fortunately at least we’re by a lake) refreshes and delights my husband; each day of primitive camping makes me listless, cranky, and eager to return to civilization.

He is an experienced camper, and so he spoils me. He makes oatmeal and coffee on the primus stove and lights the lantern at night.  During a dreadful storm, I had to lie inside the tent with my limbs splayed to the four corners to keep it from blowing away while he secured it from the outside with some peg combination or other he designed on the spot.

Next time I go camping I’m taking Jerome K. Jerome and any comic novels or silly travel books you recommend. I do think I might need a dog, too.

Because believe it or not, I have the urge to go camping.

In Search of Good Housing:  “Suburbia” and “Howards End”

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“One of the joys of suburbia is taking care of your own lawn.” – Bill Owens’s Suburbia

The other day I bicycled through the suburbs, gazing at the housing developments with bizarre nostalgia: the ranch houses, the split-levels, the townhouses, the boxy Colonials, the houses which, from the front, appear to be three-car garages, the retro- Victorians with optional turrets and verandas, and the McMansions. And I realized, not without regret, that I will never have the experience of living in a suburb. 

Photo from Bill Owens’s Suburbia

I am a lifetime town-and-city dweller, but I am enchanted by Bill Owens’s Suburbia (1973), an uncondescending book of photographs of suburbanites and their houses. In one photograph, a house is being built on a bare dirt tract, with a rubble of bricks spilled out on the ground and only a few tufts of grass. A sign says: “This home is being built expressly for Edwards.” 

In another picture, a man and his wife and family are rolling out the lawn. They bought it in rolls, prepared the ground, and then spent a day rolling it out. And in yet another photo, a young man and woman lie in bed in a room with 26 mirrors. They say they enjoy watching themselves make love.

And of course there are photos of barbecues. And people standing in front of their cars, or in their garages.  Women cleaning bathrooms.  But suburban life has a price:  isolation.  The community activities take place elsewhere. All those SUVs and trucks driving miles and miles, to and fro, back and forth…

American suburbs began to mushroom in the U.S. after World War II, with the increasing construction of highways and the expansion of car culture.  And in 1944 a builder named Bill Leavitt decided to build mass-produced houses on the outskirts of cities.  Between 1944 and 1950, the number of new “housing starts” rose from 114,000 to 1.7 million.

When I was growing up, a wave of middle-class families began to build new houses on the outskirts of town. The women especially were dedicated to attention to details like picking out doorknobs and light fixtures.  The Director of the Public Library said in an interview in the ‘90s that building her suburban house in the ‘60s prepared her to plan and build the new, much larger public library.

 I never saw the appeal of those treeless suburban spaces. Enthusiasts refer to our town as Disneyland, and it was pleasant and pretty. We lived in a ranch house on a tree-lined street, with a willow tree, a pear tree, and two apple trees in the back yard.  And then there was exotic Ardenia around the corner, a brick apartment house with the false front of a castle.  Ardenia’s back yard extended narrowly between Howell St. and Marcy St. We climbed the fence and snuck around the grounds, though it didn’t live up to expectations.  Ardenia has been demolished and replaced by condos, but everything changes, doesn’t it?  Urban sprawl has trampled over the former farms and much agricultural land, and the town, with the burbs, has almost doubled in size.

Urban sprawl is nothing new:  E. M. Forster deals with this problem in his great 1910 novel, Howards End.  In many ways, Howards End is a redefinition of the meaning of home. 

The plot depends on houses and housing, on Margaret Schlegel’s search for a suitable flat in London after the lease on their flat expires.  She lives with her younger sister, Helen, and their adenoidal brother, a student, and they can’t find anything affordable or livable. Another home in jeopardy is Howards End, a centuries-old house in the country, which, with the advent of motorcars, is becoming suburban. The owner of the house, Mrs. Wilcox, takes a fancy to Margaret and leaves Howards End to Margaret in her will, so what can Mr. Wilcox, a bourgeois businessman who wants to hang on to the property, do but marry her?  Margaret is reasonably contented, but there is a class tug-of-war over Howards End.  And her impulsive younger sister, Helen, forces the Wilcoxes to confront the class issue, which has wide ramifications. Who and what will prevail in the uncomfortably fast-changing culture and the redefinitions of home and family?

In Forster’s essay, “The Challenge of Our Time” (Two Cheers for Democracy, 1939), he indignantly criticizes urban sprawl.  He feels affection for his boyhood home and the not particularly beautiful agricultural county where he grew up.  “Life went on there as usual until this spring.  Then someone … was casually informed that … the whole area had been commandeered.” He learns  that the officials of the Ministry of Town and County Planning are building a “satellite town” for 60,000 people.

He writes,

The people now living and working there are doomed; it is death and life there and they move in a nightmare.  The best agricultural land has been taken, they assert; the poor land by the railway has been left; compensation is inadequate.  Anyhow, the satellite town has finished them off as completely as it will obliterate the ancient and delicate scenery.  Meteorite town would be a better name.  It has fallen out of a blue sky. 

The trouble with the suburbs is not only the destruction of nature, but the increase in emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels -that is, the long-distance driving.  

It is economically and environmentally better to live in a city. I have lived in cities and towns with good mass transit systems and supermarkets and shops within walking or biking distance.  It became more challenging with the death of downtown, when the last department store closed; now there are still restaurants, bars, and gift shops downtown, but little else. That’s the pattern, isn’t it?  Well, there are buses to the super-mall, online shopping, and, may I just say, thank God for the presence of Target in the cities.

“It’s a Wonderful World”:  Claudette Colbert As Poetess

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Claudette Colbert

 ” You’ve got a super-degenerate’s face.” – Claudette Colbert in It’s a Wonderful World

Yes, well, I said I’d do it and I’m doing it. A lot of this work is simply writing in my diary, which is an act of rebellion, because it doesn’t follow any particular thread, nor does it take the form of a blog post.   I’m scribbling about pop culture, about how it’s changed in my lifetime, and about the snappy studio movies of the 1930s and ‘40s. I am dismayed to observe that Covid has vanquished smart comedies for adults. In fact, there are no movies for adults. The theater posters push superheroes, horror, and science fiction.  The best of the lot was the Star Wars marathon on May 4:  “May the Fourth Be With You!”

I miss going to theaters. Like many movie-goers, I frequented the “art” theaters that showed a mix of classic films and foreign films.  One night it would be Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, the next night Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, and then Bergman’s long, very long drama, Scenes from a Marriage.   

In today’s tragic, beautiful world, I turn to screwball comedies. These comedies of the studio era, many made during the Depression, distracted audiences from bank failures, drought, and homeless hoboes. 

But comedies trump everything else, in my book.  Well, humor is buoyant:  it lifts our mood, it no doubt gets the endorphins doing whatever they do.  One of my favorite actresses is Claudette Colbert, who was droll and adorable but not exactly beautiful – not to be mistaken for a Barbie doll.  She was a smart actress with comic timing that makes every scene snap. 

Her most famous movie is It Happened One Night (1934), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. It is a charming, perfect film, directed by Frank Capra, an  “on the lam” movie in which Colbert plays a spoiled young heiress who runs away from her controlling father and finds herself on a bus with Clark Gable, a reporter, who wants an exclusive story on her. He rides with her and promises to protect her, as while the police and reporters frenetically pursue her.  As you might expect, this mismatched couple fall in love.  This trope works well in the movies and let us hope in life too.

And then there’s It’s a Wonderful World (1939), a movie no one remembers, in which Claudette Colbert  has one of her best roles, Edwina Corday, a witty poetess. She constantly uses the word “poetess,” which is funny in itself, and which confounds Jimmy Stewart, who plays Guy Johnson, a Private Investigator on the lam, because he is accused of a murder he is innocent of.  Never mind how she accidentally got involved with him, but Guy,  who is an uncultured chap, finds the poetry gig incomprehensible.  “That’s all?”   “Yes, that’s all I do.”  And throughout the film, she recites odd little whimsical poems at strange moments, a short ditty while peeping gamine-like out of a porthole on a boat at Jimmy Stewart.  It’s like looking at a very cute three-dimensional greeting card. 

Jimmy Stewart and Claudette Colbert in It’s a Wonderful World.

When Guy tries to get rid of her so she will be out of danger (and because she is in the way), she replies, “If anything happens, the publicity will help my poems enormously.” This isn’t so much a  wisecrack as modest vanity (an oxymoron, but apt).   Edwina loves being Guy’s fellow PI almost as much as she loves her poetry.

I had forgotten how charming young Jimmy Stewart is, so lanky and handsome. Colbert, in this film, manages to be slightly eccentric, absurd in the sunglasses she hides behind as a disguise, and in her trim but slightly schoolmarmish blouses with shoulder pads and a bowtie.

And there is a reference to Adam and Eve when, after spending the night outdoors, she points out an apple orchard and suggests they pick apples for breakfast. 

“They’re tame apples.  You don’t have to shoot them,” she says.

The great thing about a modern Adam and Eve is that they aren’t kicked out of the garden.  They make one for themselves.  The two are equal:  in the final scene (or one of the final scenes)  Guy is beating up the murderer and Edwina is pummeling the murderer’s female partner.

The two are equals, and though mismatched, we know that they will marry. The poetess and the P.I. How cute.

And happily ever after, we hope.