Paris France by Gertrude Stein is infuriating, simplistic and ... a lot of fun!

Gertude Stein's Paris France is infuriating, arrogant, simplistic, and ... a lot of fun to read. Her style, bare and repetitive like a song, is not as stylized as in some of her other books. The sentence patterns, loose but not too loose, are repetitive without driving you to distraction. Combined with the humor and the wit, the style makes for a more pleasant read than say A rose is a rose is a rose, and actually succeeds in courting musicality.

Stein muses about what France is at its essence, and this is the distillation of her analysis, if you can call it that:
"So there are two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful."

This sentence appears in modified versions on nearly every page, as a necessary conclusion. The question is, who the hell did Gertrude Stein think she was to be able to resume France in the 1900-1940s in a sentence? An arrogant prick, that's who. But a sympathique prick, no doubt.

Below she argues the French perceive themselves as Latin because they are logical. Ok. Maybe. Then she states logical people do not want to go to war, and certainly Stein proves by that deduction that sheis not French and logical, because in fact the logical Romans really had a thing about going to war all the time.

"When you first really get to know the French one of the first things that puzzles you is the insistence upon their latinity. They do not consider Italians or Spaniards latin, but they the french are latin, they insist upon being Gauls but all the same they are latin. Finally I realised that what they meant was that the spirit of latinity was kept purer by them the Gallo-romans than  it was in Italy which lost its latinity when they were overcome by barbarians and never recreated it, they might take on the forms and symbols of Rome but essentially the latin culture went out of Italy and it never existed in Spain so its true home has been France. And there is a good deal of truth  in it all. At first I did not know what they were talking about but gradually I did begin to feel what they meant by their latinity.

    They meant of course logic, the only people who were interested in logic were the Romans, logic because logical people are never brutal, they are never sentimental, they are never careless, they are never intimate, in short they are peaceful and exciting, that is to say they are French. The French understand war because they are logical, they do not care to go to war because they are logical, and to be logical is to be latin. That is what I was gradually understanding. It took me a long time to really understand it."

She assembles paragraphs of sweeping judgments, some of which are intriguing, others simplistic, often both. These ramblings, which are not actually rambling in the sense of over loquacious but in their lack of depth, are intercut with stories and anecdotes whose importance seem to originate from having been witnessed by Madame Stein, or have happened to people known by her, Dukes for example.

Stein and Toklas at their most stylish

Stein feels quite confident in answering the question of how come France was the cultural capital of the world, or at least of the Western world in the late 19th century/early 20th century. This bygone era has become history, as the French capital has lost this title to New York City, and Beijing, and Berlin, and Kinshasa, and Singapore, and Delhi. Despite her ironical, distanced tone, Stein's excitement at having been a part of the Parisian scene is still palpable:

"So the 20^th Century did need France as a background. France might play with the idea of the destruction of the family as the beginning and end of everything but it could never convince any Frenchman and so France was a background for beginning of the 20^th Century, it had had its one real effort to believe that the family and the things the family holds in its hands and walks on and eats and drinks and which belong to that family, they had their try-out of trying not to believe and that’s it the beginning of 19 century in the first french revolution, but it really was not interesting. Wars yes and excitement yes, but really not interesting. There is no logic to it, no civilization to it and no fashion.       So when the 20^th Century was going to start in to try it out all over again, the Frenchmen were very content to be in it but not of it." I guess her writing teacher did not tell her about getting rid of "so" in her texts.

Some of her judgments do not apply to modern France, and it raises the question of whether France has changed, or Stein was wrong. She states that the French do not punish their children. Now, the French punish their children much more than Americans, even corporeal punishment is common in all classes of society.

Despite the book being called Paris France, it's full of anecdotes about Stein's neighbors in the countryside, and these stories do work as a windows on France before WWII. The content seems to have been the result of the following process: Stein and Toklas take a walk with their dogs close to their countryside home. They run into people and have a nice little chat with them. Stein the genius extracts a great insight about France from the meeting, and a relevant anecdote.


The book is short, written in an easy tone, fun, and not a bad read for anyone interested in that period of French history. Personally, I have sympathy for Stein, because she was a woman, a lesbian, and made no mystery about it. In the vein of the self aggrandizing, flamboyant, vociferous celebrity, she gets my vote over Hemingway, even if he had a hell of a sharp pen. And below, as a parting gift, is a story with a nice narrative, and striking images, such as these small boys on oversized bicycles because the French were not rich enough to give bicycles to their children. Children bikes probably didn't exist. Here's this sweet piece:

"Helen Button was her name and she lived in war-time. She lived somewhere but the thing that is important is that she lived during war-time.

There is a great deal of war-time in history and Helen Button lived in it. (...)

   Of course children do go in and out as they like a great deal more in war-time than in peace-time for there is not much use in just staying at home while it is war-time. 

   Helen Button started out with her dog William. As they were walking along suddenly William stopped and was very nervous. He saw something on the road and so did Helen. They neither of them knew what it was at first and at last as they approached very carefully they saw it was a bottle, a bottle standing up right in the middle of the road. There had been something in the bottle but what, it looked dark green or may be blue or black, and the bottle was standing up in the middle of the road not lying on its side the way a bottle on the road usually is.

   William the dog and Helen the little girl went on. They did not look back at the bootle. But of course it was still there because they had not touched it.

   That is war-time.

   When Helen went out there were a great many little boys on the large bicycles about. The bicycles were so tall that they cannot get on the seat at all but they were all over the country wriggling from side to side to have their ride and when they saw water and some of the roads were under water they went forward and back through the water to make it splash. That was because their big brothers and their fathers were gone away and that made so many more little boys able to play. 

   Then Helen did know it was war-time. 

   Helen and her dog William were out every day and almost every evening and they always saw someone. They knew a boy named Emil who was a big boy with very large eyes and a dog named Ellen. Ellen the dog had been born in the country against which they were fighting. Emil looked at his dog and wondered if he could love him. The dog loved Emil but could Emil love him.

   As Helen and her dog William came along Emil's dog Ellen sniffing along the side of the road in the sand and finally went sniffing up the bank. Helen's dog William went sniffing too. Perhaps there was game there, very likely because in war-time men did not go shooting nobody hunted anything only dogs and cats hunted in war-time, Emil the boy with large eyes sighed about this. He said dogs hunt in war-time but they do not get much, anybody could see two or three dogs going together to hunt and waiting to see if anybody saw them because in peace-time of course they can not go hunting. Then Emil said but cats in peace-time or in war-time, they sit and watch and prey. (...)

   Helen had a grandmother and when she had been the age of Helen there had been war-time. She told Helen how one day she had a slice of bread and there was very little bread to be had, but she did have a good big slice and she was just commencing eating it. A soldier came along an enemy soldier on a horse, he stopped and got off this horse and not roughly but he did, he took the slice of bread out of her hand, she had just had one bite and he gave it to his horse who ate it and he went away on his horse and he did not say anything."

Please note: I have tried to reproduce the text's random capitalization. For Stein, all French people seem to be men, and a dog named Ellen is a he. In the story of Helen, the characters all have English names or English spelling of French names. My guess is that Stein could not be bothered to find out the real names or relevant spellings. Or she invented the whole thing. Which is still pretty gracious.

Stein's famous portrait by Picasso

And finally an anecdote, but that illustrates how injustice could affect a woman, and a lesbian's life. Stein left her art collection as a trust to her partner Toklas. When the collection became extremely valuable in the early 60s, the Stein family had it seized while Toklas was away from France, on the pretext she was not taking care of it properly. Toklas was never able to recover it, despite legal action. It's also distressing that Stein did not leave the collection to Toklas as an inheritance. Selling one piece would have saved her from her poverty in her late years. 

Published and written by  - - Arabella von Arx

Arundathi Roy - the audience in the palm of her hands

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Author: Arundathi Roy

Book: Walking with the Comrades

The crowd chatted feverishly while waiting to be let into the auditorium. "Literary sensation!", "brimming with talent", "unique sense of vernacular" were the terms flying around the groups in the foyer. Ages ranging from 16 to 80, they were all educated New Yorkers who had rushed to be part of this literary communion. The doors to the large auditorium opened. Beautifully built of wood and lit as for a crowning ceremony, it held several hundreds of us. There was a rush through the doors, a run down towards for the first rows, a bit of push and shove which quieted down quite soon as we are civilized after all.

Chats, last minute cellphone check, laughs, changes of seat, no change of heart. At last the diminutive woman walked on stage, sat down, took a gulp of water and leant towards the microphone. She raised her eyes towards us, she raised her eyebrows. Not a whisper in the room, nor a cough, nor a scraping of throat or shoe. 

And Arundathi Roy started. She started, and she didn't stop. She started and she didn't let go. Telling us about tribal people being beaten, poisoned, arrested, women being raped, their land being raped. Constantly on the move to escape persecution. Undernourished, under educated, under cared for, families dispersed, belongings null. 

These people in the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Lalgarh have the great misfortune of having their lands sitting on profitable minerals and metals. Where they lived close to nature and far from what is called civilization, large companies have arrived with equipment to dig up the earth and pollute the waters, the airs, the soil. They burn villages, they bring elephants to trample the forest, they scatter babool seeds to make the soil barren.

She had an educated audience that exercise a certain power through belonging to a privilege society, and they needed to know. This was not a literary salon where minds get stroked thanks to highbrow exchanges and eclectic language. This was about the world out there, politics, humans, pain, injustice, ugly holes dug in the earth.

At last she was done. The audience, awed, was a different group of people that had walked into that auditorium an hour before. The moderator announced that the renowned author would now sign books. A long line of people formed from the top of the stairs of the auditorium all the way to the desk she was sitting at. She had asked for our time, for our ears, for our conscience. And now she returned the favour in full. She signed at length everyone's book, talking, smiling, indefatigable, this was the woman who had walked for months through the jungles. She let people take photographs. A young couple was keen on Roy holding their 2 year old in her arms for a snapshot. The 2 year old was uncooperative. Roy waited patiently for the child to be convinced they would all treasure the memento forever, and that an ice cream would be obtained on the way out. Finally the snapshot was taken, the couple ecstatic, and Roy turned graciously to respond to the next request.

Outside the auditorium, people made a beeline for the bookselling stalls, in a much more sober mood now, and purchased Walking With The Comrades, a convincing and commendable work.

National Geographic has a very different approach to the subject. They call Arundathi Roy's "comrades" killers who stand in the way of development.

Down To Earth begs to differ from National Geographic, with hard facts and statistics.

Amnesty also condemns the violations of human rights and the breach of Indian law in the mining regions.

Written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

The 10 most underrated women writers

Writer Grace Paley

1. Grace Paley (1922-2007)

American. She’s like an older sister to me. I read her audacious writing, and I think, wow, she was so intrepid! Robert Kaplan posts quotes and excerpts from writers on facebook, and that’s how I discovered her writing. Chance. She didn’t get half the recognition and awards she deserved, and is in danger of slipping into oblivion. Help! Rescue her unique work!

What to read: her short stories. All of them: they're fun and mind blowing and very much grounded in NYC.

Why she should be read: Tone. Freedom of expression. Time capsule. Originality.

French woman writer Violette Leduc

  2. Violette Leduc (1907-1972)

This French writer was mentored by Simone de Beauvoir. The latter was a good writer too, particularly her memoirs, but not underrated. De Beauvoir, and Sartre too, behaved most shabbily at times toward their intellectual competition. But de Beauvoir paid a publishing house to forward secretly Violette Leduc a monthly allowance that allowed her to write. Most elegant. Leduc’s writing was modern in its rawness and authenticity. Totally underrated.

Why she should be read: she was a groundbreaker, her work is unflinching in describing herself and others. There is no need to make allowance when you read her, as you might for mid 20^th century writer.

What to read: La Bâtarde, no doubt. This memoir tells of her origins (she was the illegitimate daughter of a maid and an aristocrat), of her love affairs with both men and women, of her life during WWII when she was a black market operator: fascinating! Raw. Authentic. Compelling.

Swedish woman writer Selma Lagerloff

3. Selma Lagerloff (1858-1940): 

I always feel bad for people who died in the early 1940s: imagine the picture of Europe they took to the grave. She was a lesbian as was Yourcenar. Marriage, and child rearing, had typically not allowed women to develop their creativity. Successful creative women in the 19^th century and 20^th century were usually not marriedL George Sand, George Eliott, the Brontës, some were even crippled like painter Schjerfbeck.

Lagerloff was the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize (hum, she was Swedish), but is now mostly overlooked.

Why she should be read: her work is of a bold, romantic streak, without any sentimentality: a treat to devour under or over the covers.

What to read: Difficult to recommend something, as she wrote in a whole range of genders. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is a great book to read to children.  I loved her Löwenskold series, which is more realistic than some of her gothic or fantasy works.

  

French woman writer Marguerite Yourcenar.

4. Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)

Marguerite Yourcenar won a Nobel Prize yet she is not as read as she could be, maybe because work is often historical fiction but she eschews the traps of the genre. She is admired by a number of writers for her rich prose and for the drama of her work. 

Why: a beautiful stylist, and a great story teller.

What to read: Memoirs of Hadrian (Hadrian wrote an autobiography that has been lost, Yourcenar imagined what it might have been), Coup de Grâce (romantic novella about a dramatic triangle) is a great book gift for a woman in her twenties.

Anecdotal: She had a 40 year relationship with literary scholar Grace Frick. They lived together on an island in Maine.

5. Jamaica Kincaid: born 1949 in Antigua. Alive and kicking.

Writer Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer who is getting quite a bit of recognition. But that’s not good enough, because she is great, there is not a word that needs to be thrown away in her writing. She will only stop being underrated and scratched from this list when she gets the Nobel Prize.

Why she should be read: there is an undercurrent of passion, in the sense of Christ’s passion, in her work. Her prose is spare and powerful.

What to read: I love The Autobiography of My Mother (great title too), but Lucy is her most famous work.

6. Carson McCullers 1917-1967

Carson McCullers

She married a man also called McCullers who also wrote and drank. Then they divorced. Then they married again. Without ever having to alter her name in her documents. She lived at a time when a lot of creative people did not live long: Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Bowles (should she be included in this list?), Albert Camus. She had a funny, sweet face. Her style is supposed to be Southern Gothic. I don’t know, I think she’s just a good writer. Her characters are memorable, they touch the heart without sentimentality. She’s underrated because they don’t read her in high schools when it would be most appropriate content, I rest my case.

Why: great characters that will stay with you. Psychological insight. Depiction of Southern society.

What: Member of the Wedding. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is awesome too, written when she was 23.

Chinese American writer Pearl Buck

7. Pearl Buck (1892-1973) 

She led a fascinating life, being born the child of missionaries in China. She loved China, the Chinese people and peasantry which she described in her works. She was an activist against racism and sexism. The Good Earth was the second-best-selling novel of the 20th century, outsold only by "Gone With the Wind: the two best selling novels are works by women! The people voted!

Why she should be read: great story teller, amazing insights into China at the beginning of the 20^th century.

What to read: Any of the Chinese novels, such as The Good Earth. A great read for teenagers too. I positively loved her memoir, Fighting Angel, about her father, a tender and honest portrait of a stiff Baptist missionary with some redemptive traits. Apparently her portray of her mother, The Exile, is also very good.

Anecdotal: when she was old, she got involved with a shady character, some kind of swindler who squandered most of her fortune. A sad and grotesque endgame for a remarkable woman.

8. Elsa Morante - 1912-1985 –

Italian writer Elsa Morante

You read right, Morante not Ferrante. In my opinion the better writer. A powerhouse of a writer. It’s so inspiring to read explosive works by women who lived when the consensus was that women were weak creatures that could only decorate vases. Women such as Ferrante and Lagerloff and the Brontës, of course, paid no heed to these superstitions, thankfully for us. It should also remind us creators how important it is to go it alone, without worrying about trends and opinions.

She was quite successful during her life. Some of her works were translated into English. However, modern Italian does not always translate well into English, the tone is drastically different. She expressed reservations with some of her translations. She was married to Alberto Moravia, the legendary Roman writer, whose writings also do not translate well into English.

Why she should be read: epic, visionary writer

What to read: don’t, it’s too sad. Ok, if you must: La Storia. The story of an Italian woman and her little boy born from a rape by a German soldier. Mythic. Poignant. Unforgettable. 
The title is often not translated because it is not translatable. La Storia means both “story” and “history”:. Same in French with “histoire”.

9. Jetta Carleton - (1913-1999) - 

Jetta Carleton

Her novel The Moonflower Vine was a success when it was published. Then she didn’t write for another 30 years. Reasons are suggested, she married (not a good idea for women creators in the 20^th century!), she was busy founding a publishing house, but that did poorly. Maybe success was difficult for her to handle? It can be traumatic! Her second, and last novel, The Back Alleys of Spring, was written just before she was disabled by a stroke in the 1990s. It was eventually published posthumously in 2012.

Speaking of which, she’s quite the ghost writer, she died in 1999 but went on a tour in 2012...

Ursula K. Le Guin - 1929-2018 -

My count was 9 underrated women writers, and I could not narrow on anyone else: the Brontës got their due, George Eliott, George Sand have the fame they deserve (easier with a man’s first name, obviously), Marguerite Duras was an ace at self promotion, Alice Munro got the Nobel Prize. A bunch of writers could certainly do with more attention, but it’s not crying out loud: Doris Lessing, Patricia Highsmith (probably more highly regarded outside the US) the best crime writer ever, Françoise Sagan, Nathalie Sarraute, Astrid Lindgren, Sigrid Undset, Goliarda Sapienza, and most likely a whole beautiful array of writers from Asia and African and Latin America we wish we were reading (speak up in comments below!!).

Anyway, I asked around, and thought I would include this writer in the list who I have never read. A science fiction writer, she seems to gather suffrages around her writing, and is working in a genre that has been dominated by men. Time to give her a try.

Why: people say so.

What: The Left Hand of Darkness, according to Harold Bloom.

ሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖሖ

♛ After I posted about the 10 most underrated women artists, readers suggested I post about women musicians, which I felt I was not qualified to do, but am hoping someone else does. But I thought I would enjoy gathering a list of the most underrated women writers. My findings? Women writers have not been as systematically pushed out from the public eye as artists. Most intriguing!

Why? It would be very interesting to investigate this phenomenon in depth, and someone should. Right now, I would venture that there is an immediacy about books as media. No one worries about the original manuscript, the work is the words, its physical support does not matter so much. It’s a consumer good, and if it sells, it sells. The two most successful novels in the US 20^th century were written by women: Gone is the Wind, and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck (see above) Paintings need to be presented in institutions that have been run by men. Museum still show an overwhelming majority of works by white men. Art works have to be reproduced in a costly process to be spread to a larger audience. To become a good writer, writers often recommend reading extensively: that was fairly easy for educated women in the 19^th century. All a writer needs is paper, a pen and ... talent! To become a good artist, techniques need to be learned, supplies need to be accessible and affordable.

Women writers often published under men’s pen names in the 19^th century, which was not the case for women artists who did not experience that need then, or earlier, in the 17^th or 18^th century. The suppression of women artists’ work mostly happened in the 19^th century, once their painting craft became Art with a capital A and was institutionalized via museums, and the founding of art history and theory. Novels were necessary fodder for the 19^th century publications, which needed serials to hook its readership. These publications were not run by an academic establishment, they were profit making companies who didn’t care whether the content was written by a woman or a serial killer or a lemur, as long as it was successful. The 20^th century might have been relatively less egalitarian as serialization disappeared and novels became literature, flanked with literary criticism and theory. Just as painters, women writers who were successful in their lifetime have often been evinced from cultural memory: Pearl Buck, Selma Lagerloff, Jetta Carleton, Violette Leduc, etc.

♛ Two of the books, Hadrian’s Memoirs and La Storia, above are selections of the 100 best books selected by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. It’s a very interesting list though a bit biased (well, the writers doing the selecting must have felt obliged to pick each other)! 

♛ I tried to use photos of women writers at different times of their life, to give a sample of role models for aspiring writers, young and not so young.

written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

10 reasons you wish you had Samuel Pepys’ life

Samuel Pepys at the time he wrote his diary

I have been reading Samuel Pepys' diary. The abridged version: one volume of about 600 pages whereas the whole diary takes up 10 such volumes. It makes for a fascinating read, and offers such a unique insight in the London of the mid 17th century. It's a raucous time: he saw the execution of Charles I, the Restoration, the persecution of Catholics and Quakers and other non Anglican church believers, various wars, the Great Fire of London, the Plague. He lived from 1633 to 1703.

1. You have no schedule. He works for the Navy but no one seems to have heard of office hours. He usually gets up really early, but he might go to bed one night at 3am, and another day get up at 3am.

2. You socialize all the time.  He typically went to the pub two to three times a day. He has people over for dinner, at midday, or is invited. Also in the evening, but not as much. He had tens of friends, women and men alike, as well as relatives.

3. You go to the theater a lot. Pepys sees the same plays many times over. Here's what he thought of A Midsummer’s Night: 'we saw “Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.' – well, he’s not remembered for being a literary critic.

Allegory of Music, Czech wall painting

4. Music is a huge part of your life. When Pepys goes home at lunch time, he often plays music on his flagelette (a wind instrument) while his wife sings. And then again at night. If he hears music played, a song sung, he cannot resist the attraction, and has to find who is playing, who is singing, particularly if they’re good. A talent for music will reinforce his friendships of which he has many. His wife asks him for a lady companion as they re going up in the world. At first, he renegades at the expense. But when the young lady comes and he finds she can sing, and is rather pretty, he yields.

5. There was little censorship yet, you didn’t have to worry so much about being correct. Pepys “shits”, and talks about his anus and his stools abundantly. And there is no correct spelling. He writes people’s names as he sees fits. And spells some words in various variants with no particular rule. Behavior also seems to have been looser, less repressed if a bit cruder. Pepys and his wife enjoy watching an execution on a Sunday, though these shows do get mobbed. A couple of Lords regularly enjoy running around the streets of London naked and singing "bawdy" songs. They get arrested by the watch, and the King has to go and bail them out. Then they all go to visit prostitutes together.

6. It was an exciting time, half way between an era of obscurantism and one of discoveries. It’s curious the irrational things Pepys will believe, when he is a man of intelligence, and passionate about science. He teaches his wife mathematics, and takes lessons himself from various scholars. He’s delighted that he’s been invited to belong to the Royal Society. There, he attends scientific demonstrations. He has a friend who invents an unsinkable double-shelled ship, the model of which gets sold to the navy, but the first one produced promptly sinks. An early Titanic.

7. Goods were precious. Pepys gets excited about getting a pettycoat for his wife, or a trinket. He's very excited about the purchase of a watch. Then he remembers he had had one, but didn't like using it! But he’s most passionate about books, each acquisition is a source of future joy: they offer knowledge to his avid mind, whether about microscopy or other parts of the world. Sometimes, he goes and reads at his bookseller, who seems to encourage it. The bookseller’s entire lot goes in smoke during the Great Fire.

Elisabeth de St-Michel,
Samuel Pepys enduring wife

L'Histoire amoureuse des Gaules

8. You have flexible morals. Pepys, who never had to worry about #metoo, puts pressure on his suppliants’ wives to have sex with him. He describes these interactions in a despicable mixture of Spanish and French and English, producing a kind of Lingua Franca of misbehavior. That’s a most detestable aspect to his personality which is quite attractive otherwise. Moments after these spurts of fornication, he goes to church. Mostly to watch the attractive women at the service, but he does pay attention to the sermon which he is usually critical of.

He reads titillating books such as “L’Histoire amoureuse desGaules” then burns them because he does not wish them to bring him posthumous shame by being to catalogued in his library after he dies. 

Samuel Pepys, later in life, with his wig

9. You are moving up socially. Pepys was the son of a tailor. He was smart and got a scholarship to attend Oxford where he learned Latin and Ancient Greek. He got under the protection of an aristocrat that was a remote family connection and entered the administration of the Navy. Thanks to his connections, and probably to his intelligence and social skills, he gets more and more responsibility, and he becomes richer. Every month, he makes his account to figure out how rich he has become. It’s fascinating to see him hit landmarks in that ascension: he purchases a powdered wig, which takes some encouragements from his servants for him to wear outside the house. Later, he plans on getting his own coach with coachman and horses.

10. But best of all, you are always so glad just to be alive and safe. He escaped the great Fire of London, and the Plague. His account makes you realize that the Plague was much more lethal for poor people. Anyone who could afford it fled the City. It’s surprising how much it was business as usual. The government, the nobility, the bourgeoisie all transfer to the outer suburbs. And party away. Pepys takes a ferry back and forth to visit his wife. A ferry! That seems the worst place to be in a time of epidemics, the equivalent of taking a plane, as you know a sure way nowadays to catch a virus going around. The City is much more affected, and he worries every time he has to leave the countryside. He does mention stumbling in the dark on a corpse left on the street. But it’s not the image we might have of ghostly streets with barricaded windows and doors, of lone passerby wearing masks and walking close to the walls, head down. Maybe that mental picture of the Plague is closer to what the situation was like in mainland Europe. At the end of every month, he takes the time to review his situation, and he thanks God for him and his wife being in good health, for his good economic situation. Almost everyday, he eats and drinks and sings with friends, reporting in his diary they "made very merry".

SOON TO COME: 5 REASONS YOU DO NO WANT SAMUEL PEPYS' LIFE!

                                           written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

Great Fire of London

Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill's play at BAM

Escaped Alone - play by Caryl Churchill, directed by James McDonald, at the Brooklyn Opera House

The Visitor, Mrs Jarrett spies 3 retired women sitting in a backyard in England, London probably. They invite her in, after all she's one of them probably, retired, with a detestable taste in clothes and hair style. They offer her a cup of tea. Hyperrealist set. 

The women don't finish their sentences. Caryl Churchill can't be bothered, and we are grateful, because we can finish them ourselves. They talk about birds, what bird would you like to be, eagles or blackbird. They talk about cooking: I don't like to cook since I killed my husband in the kitchen.

It's a safe, dull environment. The one who killed her husband and went to jail for 6 years at least has something to discuss. Her son won't see her. The 2nd woman is depressed, she'd like to travel to Japan but going to Tesco is a challenge. The 3rd one, terrified of cats, wishes she had someone in her life she could trust to reassure that there are no cats inside her drawers or pillowcase. Loneliness. They're retired. We don't learn anything about the Visitor, but she seems to fit right in.

It's not about psychological insight. Much closer to Beckett: it's a situation, things happen to them.The actors don't worry about what their motivations are, this is no method acting time. In the loneliness of the characters, their emotions are stunted. Little puffs pop up here and there.

Suddenly, and I mean, really suddenly, the set's lights switch off and the Visitor magically appears in the foreground, as a barker at a fair. A different reality. She describes an apocalyptic world. The rivers flow backwards. Beds and dingy and swimmers float on the stock market. There is no food, and most of it go to TV shows, so the obese sell slice of themselves until they get hungry and eat rafters of their own fat.  After children and politicians set houses on fire, a whole country burns down.

Back to the women. They are surrounded by a wooden fence. From time to time a car is heard. They talk about the neighborhood: didn't a newsagent replace the fish and chips on the corner?  We have to take their word for it, because, what is behind that fence? Is it the apocalyptic world the visitor describes? If it isn't, that apocalypse could happen anytime, burst their little bubble.

It might be our future too. Who knows? In 1938, Jews in Poland sat in their gardens sipping tea. While they were aware that Hitler was a threat, and we know global warming is a threat, it must have been impossible to imagine the apocalypse at hand. Japanese sat in their gardens too on August 5, 1945, in Hiroshima.

 It could be argued this manmade apocalypse is interior to the old ladies, its potential certainly. Play goes back and forth between tame backyard and apocalyptic fairground.

One moment of sweetness: they sing  in unison an old doobop song from their youth. For a short while, they're not alone. They're playful. Nothing else matters. 

Great ensemble performances, with the Visitor, Mrs Jarrett, played by Linda Bassett with tone perfect delivery.

Funny too.

Wouldn't have minded a second act, and a third for that matter. But I suppose Ms Churchill didn't see the point, same as finishing sentences...

At the end, the Visitor leaves and closes the door on the microcosm of that backyard: "I thanked them for the cup of tea and went home." 

Well received by audience. By me too.