Bölümler
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This week on StoryWeb: Chad Everett’s TV show, Medical Center.
If only I could start with the theme song to Medical Center! If I were telling you this story in person, I’d risk humming a few bars, complete with an ambulance-like scream of notes. But alas, I’m left with mere words to conjure up for you the magic that was Medical Center, an hour-long weekly hospital drama starring Chad Everett as the hip, young Dr. Joe Gannon.
Chad Everett and Medical Center were literally my claims to fame when I was in college in the early 1980s at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, commonly known as UMSL. By this time, the 1970s-era television show was in late-night reruns. My boyfriend and I got hooked on the show when we’d catch it after getting home from our night shifts at work. We got home about 12:30, and Medical Center came on at 1:00. That theme song was a siren call of another sort, calling to us to put away the cares of the day and join Chad in fighting for the welfare of yet another patient. It became a game between us to see who could guess the outcome of the episode first, and I learned to play the theme song on my violin.
Both of us were involved in student government, and as we sat in the Student Government Association office one day, we wondered aloud just how ridiculous a group could get recognized by Student Affairs and become eligible for student activity funding.
My boyfriend seized on an idea. “Let’s propose forming the Chad Everett Fan Club of UMSL,” he said. “You can be president, and I’ll be vice president.”
The rest, as they say, is history. In no time at all, we developed a patter, a shtick about why a university needed a fan club dedicated to Chad Everett. We emphasized Chad’s appeal to pre-med students, theater students, and history majors who might want to trace Chad’s role in the country’s transition from the wet look to the dry look. For it was true: in the first season of Medical Center, Chad sported hair full of Brill Cream, but in the second season, he had hair blown dry into a perfect coif. And when anyone questioned the sincerity of our club, we’d sum up by saying that even a third-world country had named itself after Chad.
The club was – as we had suspected it would be – quickly approved as a recognized student organization, and while we never applied for funding, we could have. In the ensuing months, we held club meetings at our apartment and even got the Dean of Student Affairs in on things. We’d say, “Hi, Dean, how’s it going?” He would respond correctly, “We won’t know until we run more tests.”
Soon a story about the Chad Everett Fan Club was published in the student newspaper. (You can still read the original article online.) Then a national publication for university students, Nutshell, got in on the action. Before I knew it, Rip and Read wire dispatch, known for its zany stories, had picked up the news. It seemed the Chad Everett Fan Club was a sensation.
A month or so before graduation, I got an unexpected phone call. The woman calling introduced herself as Mira Velimirovic, a researcher for Late Night with David Letterman. It was 1983, and Letterman was still a relative newcomer to late-night TV. His show was a huge hit, so I couldn’t believe it when Mira said that she’d read the Rip and Read article about my club and that she wanted to book me on the show.
Everything happened at lightning speed. I sent Mira all the clips I had about the Chad Everett Fan Club, and we talked another time or two on the phone, as I regaled her with one Chad joke after another. I told her that yes, we did have club meetings and that club members liked to sport surgical smocks. (Conveniently enough, they were also a quite popular fashion item at the time.) I told her we were all thinking of getting vanity plates so that when we lined up our cars, you’d see “I’m only thinking of the welfare of my patient,” a sentiment Chad as Dr. Joe Gannon expressed in virtually every episode.
I made arrangements for my boyfriend to fly out to New York with me, and two of our friends – also officers in the club – drove across country and met us in Manhattan. We stayed – all four of us – in my room at the Berkshire Place Hotel. It was my first time to New York, and I was on cloud nine.
But I was nervous, too. I was going to be on national TV! The morning after we arrived, I got a call from the producer of my segment (who shall remain nameless). He wanted to chat about the segment, which would be taped with the rest of the show that afternoon at 4:00. I immediately launched into my Chad banter. The producer was silent on the other end of the line. Finally, he said we’d have to talk more about my segment later and that he’d meet me while I was in makeup at the NBC studios.
My boyfriend and I went to the studio – and our friends made their plans to be in the studio audience. As I was finishing getting my makeup on, here came the segment producer, wearing – of all things! – a green surgical smock.
We chatted for a couple of minutes, with me inserting my one-liners along the way.
Finally, the producer looked me in the eye and said, “Wait. Be straight with me. You are the president of a legitimate fan club, aren’t you?”
I held his gaze, not blinking. “No, it’s a joke. I’ve been very clear in all the things I’ve sent Mira and all the conversations I’ve had with her.”
It became painfully obvious that he hadn’t looked at anything I’d sent. Apparently, he hadn’t even talked to Mira.
He walked my boyfriend and me to the green room – and then said pointedly, “I’ll leave you here to think about what you want to do.”
The producer had made it clear that I needed to go on the show and act like the president of an actual, straight-up fan club.
My boyfriend and I sat in the green room, joined by character actor Calvert DeForest, who played Larry “Bud” Melman, a regular on the show. Also on hand was actor Daniel Stern. They’d be on the show as well that day.
Together, my boyfriend and I talked about what to do. No way was I willing to be the butt of my own joke. We finally decided I’d try to play things in such a way that viewers wouldn’t quite be able to tell if I was the president of a bona fide fan club – or not.
Dave announced me in his opening monologue, so this was really going to happen. I was really in the NBC Studios in New York City, and I was about to appear on one of the most popular television shows at the time.
As the time for my segment approached, I grew more and more nervous. I had been anxious enough about appearing on national TV, but now I had the added worry of figuring out how to play things.
At long last, I was brought to the staging spot – the place where you stand until you are tapped on the shoulder and told to walk on the set. My heart pounded. My throat was in my mouth, which of course was completely dry. How was I going to do this?
Suddenly, without warning, the segment producer was at my side. “Look,” he said, “we don’t have people like you on the show to be funny. That’s Dave’s job.”
I looked at him, waited.
“I’m canceling the segment,” he said finally.
“Thank God!” I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“Why did you say that? No one’s ever said that before!”
I didn’t bother to answer. I’d had enough of this guy.
I returned to the green room just in time to hear David Letterman say, “Linda Tate’s been taken out back and beaten senseless.” When the audience groaned, he said, “No, no. We’ve simply run out of time. We’ll have her on a future show.”
With that, the show was over. We posed for pictures with Larry “Bud” Melman and Paul Shaffer, the band leader. David Letterman came backstage to greet me. Somehow in our brief conversation, it came out that I went to college full time and worked full time. “That’s not possible,” he said, completely dismissing my reality.
After the taping was over, Mira sought me out to see what had happened. I wasn’t in tears, but I was shaken up. Mira was outraged on my behalf, completely blamed the producer for not doing his homework for the segment. She went into their music library and pulled the Chad Everett record album the show owned. It was eponymously titled Chad. My boyfriend and I owned All Strung Out, the other of Chad’s two albums. Mira was delighted to give me the show’s copy of Chad – so now we had a full Chad Everett discography. Let me just say that it’s a good thing Chad was a decent television actor because he surely wasn’t going to make it as a singer. My particular “favorite” was Chad’s cover of “Ain’t No Sunshine.” A classic!
Mira wanted to do more to make it up to me, so she told me to take a cab all over Manhattan to see the city and to send her the bill. She would see that the show reimbursed me.
Over the years, I followed Chad’s career until his death in 2012. Though Chad had guest star roles on a number of made-for-TV movies, shows such as Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel, and Airplane II: The Sequel, he never again hit it as big as he did when he played Dr. Joe Gannon. Even today, I would enjoy pulling up a seat in front of a TV playing Medical Center. It would take me back to our digs at Lucas-Hunt Village Apartments in St. Louis, those late nights when classes and work were done and all we had left to do was figure out how Chad was going to save the patient.
There you have it – a true story of your StoryWeb host’s first foray into mass media – bringing her love for Chad to national TV.
Want to add a few Chad collectibles to your own celebrity collection? You can buy the complete Medical Center series on DVD, a publicity poster of Chad, and vinyl versions of his record albums, Chad and All Strung Out. For more on Chad, check out Warner’s “16 Facts About Medical Center’s Dr. Joe Gannon, Chad Everett.”
Visit thestoryweb.com/Everett for links to all these resources and to watch a clip from a typical episode of Medical Center and to hear the Medical Center theme song. Finally, no celebration of Chad’s career would be complete without listening to his rendition of “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Find it at thestoryweb.com/Everett too.
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This week on StoryWeb: Cynthia Morris’s novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach.
What do you get when you combine time travel, intriguing literary history, Paris, and romance? Why, Cynthia Morris’s novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach, of course!
I know Cynthia from participating regularly in what she previously called Free Write Flings, month-long excursions that have “flingers” writing freely for fifteen minutes each day in response to various “prompts.” I’ve dipped into Cynthia’s Free Write Flings twice a year for the last several years – every October and February – to generate ideas for StoryWeb. Go behind the scenes with us to see how it works at Beth Hayden’s website. Note that Cynthia has just launched a new version of this month-long experience. It’s called The Devoted Writer.
Cynthia is a well-known and expert writing and creativity coach. Through her business, Original Impulse, she offers online workshops, individual coaching, books to help your creative practice, and travel opportunities. Based in Denver, Cynthia leads courses in Paris quite often, leading other creative spirits through the streets of her favorite city as they create illustrated journals.
But Cynthia is very much a writer in her own right. Can’t travel to Paris with Cynthia? No worries. You can get an intimate look at the City of Light through Cynthia’s 2012 novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach.
Sylvia Beach was, of course, the owner of the famed Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. Cynthia makes Beach’s 1930s Paris accessible to us nearly a century later with the magical twists and turns of highly delightful time travel.
When Denver bookstore clerk Lily Heller visits Paris in the present day, she’s captivated by the history of the city, especially all the literary lore. She imagines all of the ex-pat Americans writing and mingling on the Left Bank, often at Shakespeare and Company.
How perfect, then, when Lily slips through a crack in time and finds herself in the 1930s Paris she’s been dreaming of. As she clatters around Paris on her bicycle, we hold our breath with her as she encounters one amazing historical person after another and let it out again when she lands a job at Sylvia Beach’s bookstore.
Before long, Lily’s got a romance on her hands with Paul and a mentor in Sylvia Beach. Will she ever want to step back through the crack in time and return to her life in twenty-first century Denver?
You’ll have to read Chasing Sylvia Beach to find out where Lily’s adventures lead her. As you join her on the streets of Paris, you’ll feel like you’ve been transported back in time as well.
Learn more about Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare and Company website. You can also learn why Cynthia has been obsessed with Sylvia Beach for years – be sure to check out the video of Cynthia talking about Beach!
And if you’re an aspiring or experienced writer, artist, or some other kind of creative spirit, consider joining Cynthia for one of her many offerings. Visit Amazon to buy your own copy of Chasing Sylvia Beach or stop in at Cynthia’s online shop and the Original Impulse library for resources that will nurture your creative life.
Visit thestoryweb.com/morris for links to all these resources.
Listen now as Cynthia Morris reads from Chasing Sylvia Beach.
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Eksik bölüm mü var?
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This week on StoryWeb: James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare.
It has been more than 25 years since I read Rev. James H. Cone’s book Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. I was teaching an English 101 course focused on the writing of the Civil Rights Movement, and I wanted to learn more about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X and to understand better the relationship between them, the intersection points, if any, between them. Of course, I’d already read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his landmark “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
But it was James H. Cone’s 1991 book, Martin & Malcolm & America, that helped me to deeply understand how the two seemingly diametrically opposed civil rights leaders were actually two sides of the same coin. There was so much more to say than that Dr. King preached nonviolence and that Malcolm X advocated violence. Indeed, it was not even accurate to say that Malcolm X “advocated violence.” It was more that he advocated or understood the need for self-defense. Particularly in his softened views after his pilgrimage to Africa and to Mecca, Malcolm X embraced a position of love as much as Dr. King did.
Cone’s book tells the full story of Dr. King and the full story of Malcolm X and the story of their evolving relationship with each other’s viewpoints. It helped me to realize fully and deeply the important and crucial role both of these leaders played in the Civil Rights Movement as their messages resonated against each other, as they responded to each other’s critique and moved closer to each other’s ways of thinking.
It is far too easy for Americans today to embrace King’s words, to share in his vision of an American dream of racial justice and equality. Americans find King’s words inspiring – but also in many ways palatable, manageable, acceptable.
But many of us are still rattled by Malcolm X’s direct, hard-hitting, even harsh ideas, his assessment that blacks were living in a nightmare realized. In his earlier days, he denounced whites as the devil, though in later days he brought more love to his view of white Americans. Still, his words – both pre- and post-Mecca – are raw and unfiltered. They do give African Americans the right to fight back in self-defense. After reading and absorbing Malcolm X’s teachings, it is impossible not to see Frederick Douglass’s fight against the slave breaker Mr. Covey in any other light. He was fighting back in self-defense, just as Malcolm X would have called him to do. He was literally fighting for his life.
Rev. James H. Cone, who was a minister during the Civil Rights era, has been a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City since 1970. Though you might not know his name, rest assured he is a recognized intellectual leader in the fight for justice for African Americans. In a 2008 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Cone explains his theory of “black liberation theology,” which draws inspiration from both Dr. King and Malcolm X, as "mainly a theology that sees God as concerned with the poor and the weak."
Dr. King and Malcolm X met only once – and that was quite accidentally when they ran into each other in the halls of the U.S. Capitol building in March 1964. But their lives and philosophies and teachings influenced each other more than most of us know. If you want an excellent introduction to and exploration of the Civil Rights Movement and its two seemingly different leaders, I encourage you to read Martin & Malcolm & America, an outstanding comparative intellectual biography in every way. It changed my thinking and understanding profoundly and fundamentally more than a quarter century ago.
Visit thestoryweb.com/cone for links to all these resources and to watch Rev. James H. Cone in conversation with Dr. Cornel West as they discuss West’s book Black Prophetic Fire. West’s book – written in dialogue with and edited by Christa Buschendorf – looks at the work of six revolutionary black leaders: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. You’ll also find a photograph of the only time Dr. King and Malcolm X met in person on March 26, 1964.
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This week on StoryWeb: Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Malcolm X wrote his famed autobiography in collaboration with African American journalist Alex Haley (most famous for his epic book Roots: The Saga of an American Family). If you are one of the many Americans who believe Malcolm X espoused violence, even hate, I urge you to read this compelling book. It reveals Malcolm X as a much more nuanced thinker and leader than depicted in mainstream media.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X resonates with so much other American literature before and after its publication in 1965 after Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21 of that year. Writing his first slave narrative more than a century earlier, Frederick Douglass emphasized literacy as the crucial key to freedom. Malcolm X, too, speaks of the transformation he experienced in prison when he came under the influence of a fellow inmate who inspired him to read voraciously and thereby educate himself. But Douglass also indicates that the physical act of fighting back against the slave breaker Mr. Covey was a turning point in his life as well. Similarly, Malcolm X, rather than promoting violence, reserved the right to self-defense, to fight back physically if pushed into a corner. Douglass’s story of transformation is pivotal not only because it tells how his journey to literacy liberated him but also because it was at the moment he defeated Covey that Douglass became a man – and Malcolm X builds on the tradition Douglass established.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X also looks forward to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir, A Place to Stand. In this book and in the film based on it, Baca tells a similar story of slowly, methodically, hungrily learning to read and write bit by bit while incarcerated in the infamous Arizona State Prison. Baca literally learns to read and write from scratch. Although Malcolm X was already literate when he entered prison, he had not finished school, and his passion for reading, learning, and gaining knowledge grew exponentially during his imprisonment. Both men were deeply changed when their prison time opened them up to larger ideas via the written word.
Malcolm X has usually been portrayed as the polar opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is true that Malcolm X, who espoused self-defense, even if that self-defense is violent, disagreed for most of his life with Dr. King, who espoused nonviolent direct action. But after his trip to Africa and to Mecca in 1964, Malcolm X repudiated the Nation of Islam and spoke out against racism while continuing to call for black self-determination and black self-defense.
Malcolm X and Alex Haley worked on The Autobiography of Malcolm X between 1963 and 1965, before and after the trip to Africa and Mecca. That time span gives readers the opportunity to witness a spiritual conversion of sorts, as Malcolm X ultimately calls for black pride. Moreover, he calls for white allies to be “out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s their own home communities. . . . That’s where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.”
The transformative experience of gaining literacy and thus gaining a kind of inner freedom, the tale of an incomparable man’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, the story of a journey from the Nation of Islam to Mecca to an embracing of nonracist black pride – The Autobiography of Malcolm X is this and so much more.
Too often, Americans, especially white Americans, equate Dr. King with love and Malcolm X with hate, Dr. King with nonviolence and Malcolm X with violence. But as James H. Cone shows in Martin & Malcolm & America, the two men’s journeys brought them closer together in their thinking toward the end of their lives, both of which were cut short by assassination. Next week, I’ll offer a look at Cone’s book.
To learn more about Malcolm X, read his autobiography – and also make time to watch Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic, Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington. You may also want to watch all or part of PBS’s outstanding Eyes on the Prize documentary series; the episode titled “The Time Has Come (1964-1965)” features Malcolm X. The book, the biopic, and the documentary will all give you insights into this fearless civil rights leader.
Visit thestoryweb.com/malcolmx for links to all these resources and to watch a Great Books episode on The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
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This week on StoryWeb: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Birmingham, Alabama, protesting racism and racial segregation in the city. He was arrested on Good Friday for demonstrating, which a circuit court judge had prohibited. While he was in solitary confinement, Dr. King wrote what is arguably the most important letter in American history. It was addressed to the white clergy of Birmingham, who had publicly criticized Dr. King for getting involved in a matter far from his home in Atlanta. Dr. King began drafting his responses on the very newspaper in which the eight white ministers had published their “call for unity.” According to the Washington Post, he continued writing on “scraps of paper, paper towels and slips of yellow legal paper smuggled into his cell.”
The justly famous letter – now known as “Letter from Birmingham Jail” – draws both from the early Christian tradition of letter writing (often from jails) and the African American preaching tradition. Following Paul’s strategy of writing epistles while incarcerated for his beliefs (the origin of several books in the New Testament), Dr. King reaches out to his fellow brethren of the clergy, appealing to them on the basis of their shared faith. At the same time, Dr. King draws on the rich oratory of the black church. While this letter was printed in a variety of publications and was therefore meant to be read, it bears reading aloud to hear the cadence of the prose.
Dr. King acknowledges his debt to many thinkers before him, among them Socrates, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, T.S. Eliot, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich. A particular influence here and throughout the entire civil rights movement is Henry David Thoreau. When he addresses unjust laws and the responsibility of people of good conscience to protest such laws, Dr. King echoes Thoreau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government.” This essay, also known as “Civil Disobedience,” was composed after Thoreau spent one night in the Concord, Massachusetts, jail for failure to pay a poll tax. The tax would have gone, in part, to support the Mexican-American War, which Thoreau and other abolitionists believed was being waged to expand the practice of slavery in the United States. Thoreau was an ardent supporter of the abolitionist cause. In fact, his cabin at Walden Pond was sometimes used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau welcomed runaway slaves at his cabin during the day and took them to safe houses in Concord at night.
Dr. King looked to Thoreau, among others, for inspiration for his theory of nonviolent direct action, a practice he outlines and defends in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” So closely linked are Thoreau’s essay and Dr. King’s letter that they have even been published together. Dr. King wrote in his autobiography:
During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience” for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement. . . . Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.
King’s major claim in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” – that white moderates are standing idly by, telling black civil rights activists to “wait” – is a message that resonates today. In the wake of the Ferguson uprising and in the energy of #BlackLivesMatter, many in the white community have remained silent, and indeed many – both white and black civil rights leaders of an older generation – have criticized young activists for their seemingly aggressive, in-your-face protests. I can imagine Dr. King pushing back and telling the older whites and blacks, “’Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” Dr. King had been criticized by the white Birmingham clergy and by many others as being “extreme.” He willingly accepted this label, aligning himself with Jesus and other great reformers who King said could be seen as extremists. “[T]he question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be,” writes Dr. King. “Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”
In one of the letter’s most powerful passages, Dr. King explains why African Americans cannot “wait.” The passage contains an extraordinary sentence, exceptional not only in its length but also in the power of its message and argument. Dr. King writes,
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" – then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
You’ll find it moving and inspiring to read Dr. King’s letter. You can do so online at the University of Pennsylvania’s African Studies Center website. If you want to add Dr. King’s works to your library, consider buying A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches. Two book-length considerations of Dr. King’s letter are also available: Jonathan Rieder’s Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation and Jonathan Bass’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Visit thestoryweb.com/letter for links to all these resources and to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., read “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
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This week on StoryWeb, Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles.
Born in 1876, Susan Glaspell was a prominent novelist, short story writer, journalist, biographer, actress, and, most notably, playwright, winning the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Alison’s House. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the ground-breaking Provincetown Players, widely known as the first modern American theater company. In fact, it was Glaspell who discovered dramatist Eugene O’Neill as she was searching for a new playwright to feature at the theater.
Though she was a widely acclaimed author during her lifetime, with pieces in Harper’s and Ladies’ Home Journal and with books on the New York Times bestsellers list, Glaspell is little known today. She comes down to us for two related works: her one-act play Trifles, written in 1916, and a short story based on the play, “A Jury of Her Peers,” written in 1917. The play and the story were based on Margaret Hossack’s murder trial, which Glaspell covered as a young reporter for the Des Moines Daily News in her home state of Iowa.
Trifles – which she wrote in just ten days – is a masterful account of the way two housewives successfully unravel the mystery of another housewife’s murder of her husband. Mr. Wright has been found dead in his bedroom, strangled with a rope. His wife, Mrs. Wright, is in the kitchen, acting “queer,” according to Mr. Hale, the neighbor who initially discovers the murder.
The play takes place the day after the murdered man is discovered and after his wife has been taken to jail. Three prominent men of the community – Sheriff Peters, County Attorney Henderson, and Mr. Hale – go to investigate the murder scene. Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale bring their wives along with them, just in case they can discover any clues to the murder.
It is widely assumed that Mrs. Wright killed her husband, but what is her motive? The three men are truly stumped. What would cause an ordinary housewife in a seemingly calm and tidy home to kill her husband?
As the detectives are investigating the murder scene in the bedroom upstairs, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale look around the kitchen and the parlor. Little by little, they begin to spy clues to Mrs. Wright’s emotional state. Erratic stitches in a piece of quilting when all the other needlework was straight, beautiful, unblemished. An empty birdcage with a broken door. A dead canary – its neck twisted – hidden in Mrs. Wright’s sewing basket in a piece of silk. The women realize without even speaking to each other that Mr. Wright had killed the bird and driven his wife to murder. And with silent, knowing looks at each other, they decide not to tell the men what they’ve discovered.
For an outstanding reworking of Glaspell’s play, see Kaye Gibbons’s 1991 novel, A Cure for Dreams. Gibbons, a North Carolina writer, obviously had Trifles in mind as she depicts ##, a character who “hides” her crime in her quilting. You can learn more about the connections between Trifles and A Cure for Dreams in my first book, A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South. (Check out Chapter 6, “The Southern Wild Zone: Voices on the Margins.” My discussion of A Cure for Dreams begins on page 194, and I explore the links between Glaspell and Gibbons on pages 201-202.)
Trifles also make me think of Adrienne Rich’s early poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” The elderly Aunt Jennifer has spent her adult life being “mastered” by her husband. His ring – that is, her wedding band – weighs heavy on her hand. But that weight doesn’t stop her from creating scenes of liberation, power, and strength in her needlepoint. In her tapestry, Aunt Jennifer depicts tigers – “prancing, proud and unafraid.” There’s a story there, Rich seems to say, a sign for those who are adept enough to read it.
Finally, Trifles reminds me of African American women quilters who sewed into their quilts messages about the underground railroad. The classic study of these quilts is Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. Something seemingly so simply and utilitarian as a quilt has the power to be subversive. As Alice Walker notes in her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” women’s creativity – and the clues it provides to women’s lives – can be found everywhere if one simply knows where to look. Quilts, gardens, kitchens – “just” women’s work – can illuminate the secrets of women’s lives.
One thing’s for sure: Glaspell’s work deserves more attention. Oxford University Press published Linda Ben-Zvi’s biography of Glaspell in 2005, and both Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers” are widely anthologized and frequently taught in classrooms across the country. If you want to join me in learning more about Glaspell, visit the website of the International Susan Glaspell Society. They even offer a timeline of Glaspell’s writing of Trifles. And to learn about Glaspell’s most enduring legacy, the Provincetown Players, visit the Provincetown Playhouse website, dedicated to preserving the history of this truly revolutionary theater.
Listen now as I read Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers” in its entirety.
When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.
She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too—adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.
"Martha!" now came her husband's impatient voice. "Don't keep folks waiting out here in the cold."
She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.
After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn't seem like a sheriff's wife. She was small and thin and didn't have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff's wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn't look like a sheriff's wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff—a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale's mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights' now as a sheriff.
"The country's not very pleasant this time of year," Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.
Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.
"I'm glad you came with me," Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.
Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn't cross it now was simply because she hadn't crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, "I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster"—she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.
The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, "Come up to the fire, ladies."
Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. "I'm not—cold," she said.
And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.
The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. "Now, Mr. Hale," he said in a sort of semi-official voice, "before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning."
The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.
"By the way," he said, "has anything been moved?" He turned to the sheriff. "Are things just as you left them yesterday?"
Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.
"It's just the same."
"Somebody should have been left here yesterday," said the county attorney.
"Oh—yesterday," returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. "When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy—let me tell you, I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by to-day, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself—"
"Well, Mr. Hale," said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, "tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning."
Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn't begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer—as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick.
"Yes, Mr. Hale?" the county attorney reminded.
"Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes," Mrs. Hale's husband began.
Harry was Mrs. Hale's oldest boy. He wasn't with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn't been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale's other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn't dressed warm enough—they hadn't any of them realized how that north wind did bite.
"We come along this road," Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, "and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, 'I'm goin' to see if I can't get John Wright to take a telephone.' You see," he explained to Henderson, "unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won't come out this branch road except for a price I can't pay. I'd spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet—guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing—well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say—though I said at the same time that I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—"
Now, there he was!—saying things he didn't need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband's eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with:
"Let's talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but I'm anxious now to get along to just what happened when you got here."
When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully:
"I didn't see or hear anything. I knocked at the door. And still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up—it was past eight o'clock. So I knocked again, louder, and I thought I heard somebody say, 'Come in.' I wasn't sure—I'm not sure yet. But I opened the door—this door," jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood, "and there, in that rocker"—pointing to it—"sat Mrs. Wright."
Every one in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale's mind that that rocker didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side.
"How did she—look?" the county attorney was inquiring.
"Well," said Hale, "she looked—queer."
"How do you mean—queer?"
As he asked it he took out a note-book and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that note-book and make trouble.
Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too.
"Well, as if she didn't know what she was going to do next. And kind of—done up."
"How did she seem to feel about your coming?"
"Why, I don't think she minded—one way or other. She didn't pay much attention. I said, 'Ho' do, Mrs. Wright? It's cold, ain't it?' And she said, 'Is it?'—and went on pleatin' at her apron.
"Well, I was surprised. She didn't ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin' at me. And so I said: 'I want to see John.'
"And then she—laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh.
"I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said, a little sharp, 'Can I see John?' 'No,' says she—kind of dull like. 'Ain't he home?' says I. Then she looked at me. 'Yes,' says she, 'he's home.' 'Then why can't I see him?' I asked her, out of patience with her now. ''Cause he's dead,' says she, just as quiet and dull—and fell to pleatin' her apron. 'Dead?' says I, like you do when you can't take in what you've heard.
"She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin' back and forth.
"'Why—where is he?' says I, not knowing what to say.
"She just pointed upstairs—like this"—pointing to the room above.
"I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I—didn't know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says: 'Why, what did he die of?'
"'He died of a rope round his neck,' says she; and just went on pleatin' at her apron."
Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. Nobody spoke; it was as if every one were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.
"And what did you do then?" the county attorney at last broke the silence.
"I went out and called Harry. I thought I might—need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs." His voice fell almost to a whisper. "There he was—lying over the—"
"I think I'd rather have you go into that upstairs," the county attorney interrupted, "where you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story."
"Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked—"
He stopped, his face twitching.
"But Harry, he went up to him, and he said, 'No, he's dead all right, and we'd better not touch anything.' So we went downstairs.
"She was still sitting that same way. 'Has anybody been notified?' I asked. 'No,' says she, unconcerned.
"'Who did this, Mrs. Wright?' said Harry. He said it businesslike, and she stopped pleatin' at her apron. 'I don't know,' she says. 'You don't know?' says Harry. 'Weren't you sleepin' in the bed with him?' 'Yes,' says she, 'but I was on the inside.' 'Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn't wake up?' says Harry. 'I didn't wake up,' she said after him.
"We may have looked as if we didn't see how that could be, for after a minute she said, 'I sleep sound.'
"Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that weren't our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road—the Rivers' place, where there's a telephone."
"And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?" The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.
"She moved from that chair to this one over here"—Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner—"and just sat there with her hands held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me—scared."
At sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.
"I dunno—maybe it wasn't scared," he hastened; "I wouldn't like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that's all I know that you don't."
He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Every one moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door.
"I guess we'll go upstairs first—then out to the barn and around there."
He paused and looked around the kitchen.
"You're convinced there was nothing important here?" he asked the sheriff. "Nothing that would—point to any motive?"
The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.
"Nothing here but kitchen things," he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.
The county attorney was looking at the cupboard—a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky.
"Here's a nice mess," he said resentfully.
The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff's wife spoke.
"Oh—her fruit," she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding. She turned back to the county attorney and explained: "She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars might burst."
Mrs. Peters' husband broke into a laugh.
"Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worrying about her preserves!"
The young attorney set his lips.
"I guess before we're through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about."
"Oh, well," said Mrs. Hale's husband, with good-natured superiority, "women are used to worrying over trifles."
The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners—and think of his future.
"And yet," said he, with the gallantry of a young politician, "for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?"
The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller towel—whirled it for a cleaner place.
"Dirty towels! Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?"
He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.
"There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm," said Mrs. Hale stiffly.
"To be sure. And yet"—with a little bow to her—"I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller towels." He gave it a pull to expose its full length again.
"Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be."
"Ah, loyal to your sex, I see," he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look. "But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too."
Martha Hale shook her head.
"I've seen little enough of her of late years. I've not been in this house—it's more than a year."
"And why was that? You didn't like her?"
"I liked her well enough," she replied with spirit. "Farmers' wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then—" She looked around the kitchen.
"Yes?" he encouraged.
"It never seemed a very cheerful place," said she, more to herself than to him.
"No," he agreed; "I don't think any one would call it cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the home-making instinct."
"Well, I don't know as Wright had, either," she muttered.
"You mean they didn't get on very well?" he was quick to ask.
"No; I don't mean anything," she answered, with decision. As she turned a little away from him, she added: "But I don't think a place would be any the cheerfuler for John Wright's bein' in it."
"I'd like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale," he said. "I'm anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now."
He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men.
"I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does'll be all right?" the sheriff inquired. "She was to take in some clothes for her, you know—and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday."
The county attorney looked at the two women whom they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things.
"Yes—Mrs. Peters," he said, his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff's wife. "Of course Mrs. Peters is one of us," he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. "And keep your eye out Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive—and that's the thing we need."
Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a show man getting ready for a pleasantry.
"But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?" he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.
The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them.
Then, as if releasing herself from something strange, Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney's disdainful push of the foot had deranged.
"I'd hate to have men comin' into my kitchen," she said testily—"snoopin' round and criticizin'."
"Of course it's no more than their duty," said the sheriff's wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.
"Duty's all right," replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; "but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of this on." She gave the roller towel a pull. "Wish I'd thought of that sooner! Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up, when she had to come away in such a hurry."
She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not "slicked up." Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag—half full.
Mrs. Hale moved toward it.
"She was putting this in there," she said to herself—slowly.
She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home—half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it,—unfinished things always bothered her,—and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her—and she didn't want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of work begun and then—for some reason—not finished.
"It's a shame about her fruit," she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: "I wonder if it's all gone."
It was a sorry enough looking sight, but "Here's one that's all right," she said at last. She held it toward the light. "This is cherries, too." She looked again. "I declare I believe that's the only one."
With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle.
"She'll feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer."
She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from sitting down in that chair. She straightened—stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there "pleatin' at her apron."
The thin voice of the sheriff's wife broke in upon her: "I must be getting those things from the front room closet." She opened the door into the other room, started in, stepped back. "You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?" she asked nervously. "You—you could help me get them."
They were soon back—the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in.
"My!" said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove.
Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted.
"Wright was close!" she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. "I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. I s'pose she felt she couldn't do her part; and then, you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively—when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that—oh, that was twenty years ago."
With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up at Mrs. Peters and there was something in the other woman's look that irritated her.
"She don't care," she said to herself. "Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl."
Then she looked again, and she wasn't so sure; in fact, she hadn't at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.
"This all you was to take in?" asked Mrs. Hale.
"No," said the sheriff's wife; "she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want," she ventured in her nervous little way, "for there's not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you're used to wearing an apron—. She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes—here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the stair door."
She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs, and stood a minute looking at it.
Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman.
"Mrs. Peters!"
"Yes, Mrs. Hale?"
"Do you think she—did it?"
A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters' eyes.
"Oh, I don't know," she said, in a voice that seemed to shrink away from the subject.
"Well, I don't think she did," affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. "Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin' about her fruit."
"Mr. Peters says—." Footsteps were heard in the room above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: "Mr. Peters says—it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech, and he's going to make fun of her saying she didn't—wake up."
For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, "Well, I guess John Wright didn't wake up—when they was slippin' that rope under his neck," she muttered.
"No, it's strange," breathed Mrs. Peters. "They think it was such a—funny way to kill a man."
She began to laugh; at sound of the laugh, abruptly stopped.
"That's just what Mr. Hale said," said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. "There was a gun in the house. He says that's what he can't understand."
"Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger—or sudden feeling."
"Well, I don't see any signs of anger around here," said Mrs. Hale. "I don't—"
She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun—and not finished.
After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself:
"Wonder how they're finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red up up there. You know,"—she paused, and feeling gathered,—"it seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!"
"But, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife, "the law is the law."
"I s'pose 'tis," answered Mrs. Hale shortly.
She turned to the stove, saying something about that fire not being much to brag of. She worked with it a minute, and when she straightened up she said aggressively:
"The law is the law—and a bad stove is a bad stove. How'd you like to cook on this?"—pointing with the poker to the broken lining. She opened the oven door and started to express her opinion of the oven; but she was swept into her own thoughts, thinking of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with. The thought of Minnie Foster trying to bake in that oven—and the thought of her never going over to see Minnie Foster—.
She was startled by hearing Mrs. Peters say: "A person gets discouraged—and loses heart."
The sheriff's wife had looked from the stove to the sink—to the pail of water which had been carried in from outside. The two women stood there silent, above them the footsteps of the men who were looking for evidence against the woman who had worked in that kitchen. That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff's wife now. When Mrs. Hale next spoke to her, it was gently:
"Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. We'll not feel them when we go out."
Mrs. Peters went to the back of the room to hang up the fur tippet she was wearing. A moment later she exclaimed, "Why, she was piecing a quilt," and held up a large sewing basket piled high with quilt pieces.
Mrs. Hale spread some of the blocks out on the table.
"It's log-cabin pattern," she said, putting several of them together. "Pretty, isn't it?"
They were so engaged with the quilt that they did not hear the footsteps on the stairs. Just as the stair door opened Mrs. Hale was saying:
"Do you suppose she was going to quilt it or just knot it?"
The sheriff threw up his hands.
"They wonder whether she was going to quilt it or just knot it!"
There was a laugh for the ways of women, a warming of hands over the stove, and then the county attorney said briskly:
"Well, let's go right out to the barn and get that cleared up."
"I don't see as there's anything so strange," Mrs. Hale said resentfully, after the outside door had closed on the three men—"our taking up our time with little things while we're waiting for them to get the evidence. I don't see as it's anything to laugh about."
"Of course they've got awful important things on their minds," said the sheriff's wife apologetically.
They returned to an inspection of the block for the quilt. Mrs. Hale was looking at the fine, even sewing, and preoccupied with thoughts of the woman who had done that sewing, when she heard the sheriff's wife say, in a queer tone:
"Why, look at this one."
She turned to take the block held out to her.
"The sewing," said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way. "All the rest of them have been so nice and even—but—this one. Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!"
Their eyes met—something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other. A moment Mrs. Hale sat her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a knot and drawn the threads.
"Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?" asked the sheriff's wife, startled.
"Just pulling out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good," said Mrs. Hale mildly.
"I don't think we ought to touch things," Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly.
"I'll just finish up this end," answered Mrs. Hale, still in that mild, matter-of-fact fashion.
She threaded a needle and started to replace bad sewing with good. For a little while she sewed in silence. Then, in that thin, timid voice, she heard:
"Mrs. Hale!"
"Yes, Mrs. Peters?"
"What do you suppose she was so—nervous about?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Hale, as if dismissing a thing not important enough to spend much time on. "I don't know as she was—nervous. I sew awful queer sometimes when I'm just tired."
She cut a thread, and out of the corner of her eye looked up at Mrs. Peters. The small, lean face of the sheriff's wife seemed to have tightened up. Her eyes had that look of peering into something. But next moment she moved, and said in her thin, indecisive way:
"Well, I must get those clothes wrapped. They may be through sooner than we think. I wonder where I could find a piece of paper—and string."
"In that cupboard, maybe," suggested Mrs. Hale, after a glance around.
One piece of the crazy sewing remained unripped. Mrs. Peters' back turned, Martha Hale now scrutinized that piece, compared it with the dainty, accurate sewing of the other blocks. The difference was startling. Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her.
Mrs. Peters' voice roused her.
"Here's a bird-cage," she said. "Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?"
"Why, I don't know whether she did or not." She turned to look at the cage Mrs. Peter was holding up. "I've not been here in so long." She sighed. "There was a man round last year selling canaries cheap—but I don't know as she took one. Maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself."
Mrs. Peters looked around the kitchen.
"Seems kind of funny to think of a bird here." She half laughed—an attempt to put up a barrier. "But she must have had one—or why would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it."
"I suppose maybe the cat got it," suggested Mrs. Hale, resuming her sewing.
"No; she didn't have a cat. She's got that feeling some people have about cats—being afraid of them. When they brought her to our house yesterday, my cat got in the room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out."
"My sister Bessie was like that," laughed Mrs. Hale.
The sheriff's wife did not reply. The silence made Mrs. Hale turn round. Mrs. Peters was examining the bird-cage.
"Look at this door," she said slowly. "It's broke. One hinge has been pulled apart."
Mrs. Hale came nearer.
"Looks as if some one must have been—rough with it."
Again their eyes met—startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred. Then Mrs. Hale, turning away, said brusquely:
"If they're going to find any evidence, I wish they'd be about it. I don't like this place."
"But I'm awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale," Mrs. Peters put the bird-cage on the table and sat down. "It would be lonesome for me—sitting here alone."
"Yes, it would, wouldn't it?" agreed Mrs. Hale, a certain determined naturalness in her voice. She had picked up the sewing, but now it dropped in her lap, and she murmured in a different voice: "But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here. I wish—I had."
"But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale. Your house—and your children."
"I could've come," retorted Mrs. Hale shortly. "I stayed away because it weren't cheerful—and that's why I ought to have come. I"—she looked around—"I've never liked this place. Maybe because it's down in a hollow and you don't see the road. I don't know what it is, but it's a lonesome place, and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now—" She did not put it into words.
"Well, you mustn't reproach yourself," counseled Mrs. Peters. "Somehow, we just don't see how it is with other folks till—something comes up."
"Not having children makes less work," mused Mrs. Hale, after a silence, "but it makes a quiet house—and Wright out to work all day—and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?"
"Not to know him. I've seen him in town. They say he was a good man."
"Yes—good," conceded John Wright's neighbor grimly. "He didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him—." She stopped, shivered a little. "Like a raw wind that gets to the bone." Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: "I should think she would've wanted a bird!"
Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. "But what do you s'pose went wrong with it?"
"I don't know," returned Mrs. Peters; "unless it got sick and died."
But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it.
"You didn't know—her?" Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice.
"Not till they brought her yesterday," said the sheriff's wife.
"She—come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change."
That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to every-day things, she exclaimed:
"Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don't you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind."
"Why, I think that's a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale," agreed the sheriff's wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness. "There couldn't possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are in here—and her things."
They turned to the sewing basket.
"Here's some red," said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. "Here, maybe her scissors are in here—and her things." She held it up. "What a pretty box! I'll warrant that was something she had a long time ago—when she was a girl."
She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it.
Instantly her hand went to her nose.
"Why—!"
Mrs. Peters drew nearer—then turned away.
"There's something wrapped up in this piece of silk," faltered Mrs. Hale.
"This isn't her scissors," said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice.
Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. "Oh, Mrs. Peters!" she cried. "It's—"
Mrs. Peters bent closer.
"It's the bird," she whispered.
"But, Mrs. Peters!" cried Mrs. Hale. "Look at it! Its neck—look at its neck! It's all—other side to."
She held the box away from her.
The sheriff's wife again bent closer.
"Somebody wrung its neck," said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.
And then again the eyes of the two women met—this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the outside door.
Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table. The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside.
"Well, ladies," said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, "have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?"
"We think," began the sheriff's wife in a flurried voice, "that she was going to—knot it."
He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last.
"Well, that's very interesting, I'm sure," he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the bird-cage. "Has the bird flown?"
"We think the cat got it," said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even.
He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out.
"Is there a cat?" he asked absently.
Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff's wife.
"Well, not now," said Mrs. Peters. "They're superstitious, you know; they leave."
She sank into her chair.
The county attorney did not heed her. "No sign at all of any one having come in from the outside," he said to Peters, in the manner of continuing an interrupted conversation. "Their own rope. Now let's go upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to have been some one who knew just the—"
The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.
The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it.
"She liked the bird," said Martha Hale, low and slowly. "She was going to bury it in that pretty box."
"When I was a girl," said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, "my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—before I could get there—" She covered her face an instant. "If they hadn't held me back I would have"—she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly—"hurt him."
Then they sat without speaking or moving.
"I wonder how it would seem," Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground—"never to have had any children around?" Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years. "No, Wright wouldn't like the bird," she said after that—"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too." Her voice tightened.
Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.
"Of course we don't know who killed the bird."
"I knew John Wright," was Mrs. Hale's answer.
"It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife. "Killing a man while he slept—slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him."
Mrs. Hale's hand went out to the bird-cage.
"His neck. Choked the life out of him."
"We don't know who killed him," whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. "We don't know."
Mrs. Hale had not moved. "If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still."
It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.
"I know what stillness is," she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. "When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old—and me with no other then—"
Mrs. Hale stirred.
"How soon do you suppose they'll be through looking for the evidence?"
"I know what stillness is," repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. "The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale," she said in her tight little way.
"I wish you'd seen Minnie Foster," was the answer, "when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang."
The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear.
"Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while!" she cried. "That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?"
"We mustn't take on," said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs.
"I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?"
She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table, she reached for it and choked out:
"If I was you I wouldn't tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain't. Tell her it's all right—all of it. Here—take this in to prove it to her! She—she may never know whether it was broke or not."
She turned away.
Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it—as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle.
"My!" she began, in a high, false voice, "it's a good thing the men couldn't hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary." She hurried over that. "As if that could have anything to do with—with—My, wouldn't they laugh?"
Footsteps were heard on the stairs.
"Maybe they would," muttered Mrs. Hale—"maybe they wouldn't."
"No, Peters," said the county attorney incisively; "it's all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing—something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it."
In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer door opened and Mr. Hale came in.
"I've got the team round now," he said. "Pretty cold out there."
"I'm going to stay here awhile by myself," the county attorney suddenly announced. "You can send Frank out for me, can't you?" he asked the sheriff. "I want to go over everything. I'm not satisfied we can't do better."
Again, for one brief moment, the two women's eyes found one another.
The sheriff came up to the table.
"Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?"
The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed.
"Oh, I guess they're not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out."
Mrs. Hale's hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.
But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying:
"No; Mrs. Peters doesn't need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff's wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?"
Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.
"Not—just that way," she said.
"Married to the law!" chuckled Mrs. Peters' husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:
"I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows."
"Oh—windows," said the county attorney scoffingly.
"We'll be right out, Mr. Hale," said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door.
Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again—for one final moment—the two women were alone in that kitchen.
Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff's wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion nor flinching. Then Martha Hale's eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman—that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.
For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke—she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.
There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff's wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen.
"Well, Henry," said the county attorney facetiously, "at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?"
Mrs. Hale's hand was against the pocket of her coat.
"We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson."
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This week on StoryWeb: Elizabeth Strout’s book Olive Kitteridge.
Has there ever been a grimmer, more taciturn main character in a book than Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge? We’ve all known someone like Olive, someone who looks like she’s just bitten into a lemon, someone for whom a kind of self-righteous grumpiness rules the day. What’s so unlikely is to have such a Gloomy Gus serve as the focal point of a book.
And it must be said: Olive Kitteridge is not a sympathetic character. As readers, we don’t like her. Those around her – most notably her son – don’t like her either. Her husband is long-suffering. Perhaps in years past, he saw something redeeming in Olive, but even he has to brush off and walk away from her brusqueness.
Why, then, would I recommend a book like this? While we don’t like Olive, we do come to understand her – and maybe we come to understand a bit more about those unpleasant people who cross our own paths from time to time. For Strout seems to be saying: everyone has a story; there’s a reason everyone ticks the way they do. As novelist Melissa Bank says of the book in her review for NPR, who says you have to like a character?
Strout’s approach to this book and this character is highly innovative and very intriguing. Strictly speaking, Olive Kitteridge is a very loosely connected collection of short stories. Yes, Olive shows up in every story – but sometimes she merely walks across the stage or, perhaps, walks across one corner of the stage. In other stories, she is definitively the main character, and those stories help the reader plumb Olive’s depths.
This kaleidoscope of stories reveals the many facets of a character who at first seems the very definition of the term “flat.” Olive, it appears initially, has one note, which might go something like “Go to hell.” But as Strout turns Olive this way and that, puts her in or near one extreme situation after another, we begin to know her. If we don’t exactly sympathize with her, we do begin to care to some degree what happens to her. The ending – which I won’t give away – gives us as readers a modicum of comfort, as it does Olive, too.
In addition to painting a portrait of Olive Kitteridge, Strout also brings to life the world of Crosby, a small town in Maine. When we leave Olive behind – as we do in several stories – we stay in Crosby, and we learn the many ways the community hurts, then marches on despite this hurt.
Is Olive Kitteridge more than a collection of short stories? Can it be called a composite novel in the vein of, say, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time? To my mind, it does very much work as a composite novel. Like Hemingway, Strout doesn’t keep a steady, straight-ahead focus on her main character – but the stories, taken as a whole, give us a rich portrait of Olive nevertheless.
Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and was made into an excellent HBO miniseries, starring Frances McDormand as Olive. To translate the book to television, the screenplay writer, Jane Anderson, put the story in roughly chronological order with Olive consistently at the center of events. Despite this imposition of linearity where there is none in the book, the miniseries is a well-done production (winning eight Emmy Awards). It’s a good supplement to the book but not a substitute for it.
I highly recommend reading the book first, then watching the miniseries. To get started, you can read Chapter 1, “Pharmacy,” on Elizabeth Strout’s website. Then consider purchasing the book and the DVD to get the full Olive Kitteridge experience.
Visit thestoryweb.com/strout for links to all these resources. There you can also listen to Sandra Burr read an excerpt from Olive Kitteridge, watch one of the trailers for the HBO miniseries, and watch Elizabeth Strout discuss the book.
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This week on StoryWeb: Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
For Patricia and our students
Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372 is not – technically speaking – a story. And Dickinson is not a storyteller per se. But her nearly 1,800 poems speak deeply and powerfully to the human condition. They give a still unparalleled account of what it is to be human.
Poem 372 does have some elements of storytelling. Instead of “once upon a time,” we get “after this, then this.” And then Dickinson describes the numbing, the freezing, the letting go – perhaps the dying that follows loss, pain, trauma.
Was she writing of a disappointment with her sister-in-law, Sue, believed by many to have been her lover? Was it a loss of a different kind? We will never know that part of the story – the who, what, when, where, perhaps not even the why. But we do very much know the how – how the loss affected her, how it feels as a human being to grieve, to feel pain.
Without a doubt, this poem makes me think of my dear friend Patricia Dwyer. When she was in high school, Patricia listened as her English teacher – a Catholic nun – recited this particular Dickinson poem. Patricia was so moved that she thought, “This is what I want to do. I want to do what Sister Helen Anthony has just done.” Patricia went on to become a nun herself for twenty years, and in that time, she became a junior high and high school English teacher and ultimately a university English professor.
The power of this poem came to me fully in 2002, when Patricia and I were team-teaching a course on American Transcendentalism. On our week-long field trip to New England, we went to Dickinson’s hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. Though many scholars don’t see Dickinson as a Transcendentalist, Patricia and I share a strong belief that she was influenced by and largely in sync with the leading literary and philosophical movement of the time.
After we toured the home Dickinson shared with her parents and the house next door where her brother, Austin, lived with his wife, Sue, we went to Dickinson’s gravesite at West Cemetery. There, we stood at the Dickinson family plot, bounded by a wrought-iron fence. It was a snowy March day, gray, heavy, damp. Together, we and our students stood silently, paying homage to the great poet.
Out of the snowy silence, Patricia began to recite the poem. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” she began, as Sister Helen Anthony had so many years ago. She concluded:
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –The silence grew deeper, and without a dry eye in the bunch, we quietly walked out of the cemetery.
To learn more about our journey to Amherst, visit the American Transcendentalism website we and our students created – and be sure to read Patricia’s journal reflections about reciting the poem at Dickinson’s gravesite. A good overview of Dickinson and her work can be found at the Poetry Foundation website. The definitive collection of her poems was edited by Thomas H. Johnson; it’s a volume that every poetry lover will want to own.
As New England once again experiences a deep chill and heavy snow, I remember Emily Dickinson.
For links to all these resources and to see photographs from our visit to Dickinson’s gravesite, visit thestoryweb.com/Dickinson. Listen now as I read Emily Dickinson’s Poem 372.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
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This week on StoryWeb: James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”
James Joyce’s “The Dead” is widely considered to be his best short story, called by the New York Times “just about the finest short story in the English language" and by T.S. Eliot as one of the greatest short stories ever written.
The storyline is simple enough: a long-married Irish couple -- Gretta and Gabriel Conroy – attend a lavish dinner party thrown by his aunts in celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). At the party, they each have a variety of conversations with assorted party guests, and Gabriel gives the evening’s post-dinner speech and leads the toast. As Gabriel and Gretta leave the party, the snow which had been lightly falling when they arrived at the beginning of the evening has become quite heavy.
The closing scene finds Gretta asleep at their hotel while Gabriel stands at the window looking at the snow blanketing the city. Gabriel feels, in fact, that the snow is falling over the entirety of Ireland. Before falling asleep, Gretta had shared a memory about Michael Furey, the Irish activist lover of her youth. The reader is left to wonder whether Gabriel feels sorrow or acceptance over his wife’s confession that she still harbors feelings for her former lover.
The ending, it would seem, is deliberately ambiguous. Indeed, the ending forces the reader to go back into the story looking for clues as to whether we’re supposed to read the ending as “happy” or “sad.”
While “The Dead” is quite a famous story, less well known to the general public is its place as the culminating story in Joyce’s first book, a collection of short stories titled Dubliners. The collection was rejected 17 times over a 10-year period, with some of those rejections being based on what publishers and printers considered to be objectionable material. Finally published in 1914, this collection of 15 stories was Joyce’s first attempt to bring his native city to life. Of course, he would go on to write again and again about the Irish capital, most famously in his 1922 novel, Ulysses, which recounts one day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he makes his way through the streets of Dublin.
But Dubliners was Joyce’s initial portrait of a city he both loved and hated. Each story in the collection features a different resident of Dublin, and each tells a different tale of the suffocating, dreary lives lived in this city. The characters presented here suffer from spiritual paralysis, squelched freedom, and ##. Joyce himself admitted that the stories capture some of the unhappiest moments of life. If you’re looking for uplifting literature, Dubliners is not the book for you.
When read against the backdrop of these stories, “The Dead” – which is the finale of sorts to Dubliners – takes on an extra richness, an extra dimension. When read in this context, the story’s ambiguous ending becomes both easier and harder to read. Has Gabriel had an epiphany about the ways in which the dead live on in the memories of the living? Or has he succumbed – as the other characters in the Dubliners stories do – to a kind of paralysis, a numbing inability to be fully alive? Is the snow a beautiful phenomenon that brings all of Ireland together? Or is it a symbol of coldness, of death, a killing frost? As one source says, “In every corner of the country, snow touches both the dead and the living, uniting them in frozen paralysis. However, Gabriel’s thoughts in the final lines of Dubliners suggest that the living might in fact be able to free themselves and live unfettered by deadening routines and the past. Even in January, snow is unusual in Ireland and cannot last forever.”
To consider the ending yourself, you’ll want to read this powerful story, which you can do for free at Project Gutenberg (and in fact, you can read the entire Dubliners collection here as well). If you prefer a hard copy, there’s an inexpensive Dover Thrift Edition.
You might also want to watch John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of “The Dead.” It starred his daughter Angelica Huston as Gretta Conroy and Donal McCann as her husband, Gabriel.
Want to dig deeper? A helpful glossary of terms is available, and a digitized copy of the first edition of Dubliners can be found at Internet Archive. Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce remains the standard, though its revised edition was published more than 30 years ago. Cornell’s James Joyce Collection is outstanding. You might also want to visit The James Joyce Centre – either online or in person in Dublin!
Visit thestoryweb.com/joyce for links to all these resources and to watch the film’s ending. But first, take a listen as I read the opening pages of “The Dead.”
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.
It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for them. Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.
Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed. They would not wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane’s pupils should see him under the influence; and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to manage him. Freddy Malins always came late but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what brought them every two minutes to the banisters to ask Lily had Gabriel or Freddy come.
“O, Mr Conroy,” said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, “Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night, Mrs Conroy.”
“I’ll engage they did,” said Gabriel, “but they forget that my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself.”
He stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his goloshes, while Lily led his wife to the foot of the stairs and called out:
“Miss Kate, here’s Mrs Conroy.”
Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive and asked was Gabriel with her.
“Here I am as right as the mail, Aunt Kate! Go on up. I’ll follow,” called out Gabriel from the dark.
He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women went upstairs, laughing, to the ladies’ dressing-room. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold, fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.
“Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy?” asked Lily.
She had preceded him into the pantry to help him off with his overcoat. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her. She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll.
“Yes, Lily,” he answered, “and I think we’re in for a night of it.”
He looked up at the pantry ceiling, which was shaking with the stamping and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano and then glanced at the girl, who was folding his overcoat carefully at the end of a shelf.
“Tell me, Lily,” he said in a friendly tone, “do you still go to school?”
“O no, sir,” she answered. “I’m done schooling this year and more.”
“O, then,” said Gabriel gaily, “I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?”
The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:
“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”
Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.
He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.
When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.
“O Lily,” he said, thrusting it into her hands, “it’s Christmas-time, isn’t it? Just ... here’s a little....”
He walked rapidly towards the door.
“O no, sir!” cried the girl, following him. “Really, sir, I wouldn’t take it.”
“Christmas-time! Christmas-time!” said Gabriel, almost trotting to the stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation.
The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:
“Well, thank you, sir.”
He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.
Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the ladies’ dressing-room. His aunts were two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.
They both kissed Gabriel frankly. He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.
“Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to Monkstown tonight, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate.
“No,” said Gabriel, turning to his wife, “we had quite enough of that last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta got out of it? Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very jolly it was. Gretta caught a dreadful cold.”
Aunt Kate frowned severely and nodded her head at every word.
“Quite right, Gabriel, quite right,” she said. “You can’t be too careful.”
“But as for Gretta there,” said Gabriel, “she’d walk home in the snow if she were let.”
Mrs Conroy laughed.
“Don’t mind him, Aunt Kate,” she said. “He’s really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor child! And she simply hates the sight of it!... O, but you’ll never guess what he makes me wear now!”
She broke out into a peal of laughter and glanced at her husband, whose admiring and happy eyes had been wandering from her dress to her face and hair. The two aunts laughed heartily too, for Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke with them.
“Goloshes!” said Mrs Conroy. “That’s the latest. Whenever it’s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. Tonight even he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn’t. The next thing he’ll buy me will be a diving suit.”
Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly while Aunt Kate nearly doubled herself, so heartily did she enjoy the joke. The smile soon faded from Aunt Julia’s face and her mirthless eyes were directed towards her nephew’s face. After a pause she asked:
“And what are goloshes, Gabriel?”
“Goloshes, Julia!” exclaimed her sister “Goodness me, don’t you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your ... over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Conroy. “Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.”
“O, on the continent,” murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly.
Gabriel knitted his brows and said, as if he were slightly angered:
“It’s nothing very wonderful but Gretta thinks it very funny because she says the word reminds her of Christy Minstrels.”
“But tell me, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate, with brisk tact. “Of course, you’ve seen about the room. Gretta was saying....”
“O, the room is all right,” replied Gabriel. “I’ve taken one in the Gresham.”
“To be sure,” said Aunt Kate, “by far the best thing to do. And the children, Gretta, you’re not anxious about them?”
“O, for one night,” said Mrs Conroy. “Besides, Bessie will look after them.”
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This week on StoryWeb: Richard Thompson’s song “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”
For Jim, in honor of his birthday
My husband, Jim, and I love this song by Richard Thompson and its signature line, “red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme.” In fact, the first concert we saw together was Thompson playing at the Boulder Theater, and of course, I sported a black leather motorcycle jacket. When Thompson sang the song, one of his most popular, and got to this particular line, Jim called out, “Me, too!” Thank goodness, Jim is not a heckler – and he didn’t disturb the concert – but I loved it! I’m guessing many red-headed women have gone to Richard Thompson concerts in black leather jackets.
Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” is a perfect story song. It’s short – just four stanzas – but it really tells a story and packs an emotional punch in that compact space. There are two, maybe three characters – the thief James Adie and Red Molly, of course, but James’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is almost a character, too.
This “fine motorbike,” as Red Molly calls it, is legendary in the U.K. The Vincent motorcycle company – based in Great Britain – made motorcycles for only four years and made fewer than thirty of this particular bike in 1952. In an interview, Thompson describes the 1952 Vincent Black Lightning as “an object of myth, a rather wonderful, rare and beautiful beast.” Or as Red Molly says, “a girl could feel special on any such like.”
What I (and so many others!) love about this song is that Thompson has written it to sound like an old English ballad. It is the perfect ballad. It has a limited cast of characters whom we care about almost instantly. There is an object of beauty – or more accurately, two objects of beauty: Red Molly and the 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. There’s a romance, some crime, and an untimely death. But the fun twist is that the old-sounding ballad is about a man and his motorcycle – as if even the modern world can be the stuff of ballads. Or as Thompson said in one live performance, “It’s a simple boy-meets-girl story, complicated somewhat by the presence of a motorcycle.”
Thompson explains the origin of the song:
When I was a kid, that was always the exotic bike, that was always the one, the one that you went “ooh, wow.” I'd always been looking for English ideas that didn't sound corny, that had some romance to them, and around which you could pin a song. And this song started with a motorcycle, it started with the Vincent. It was a good lodestone around which the song could revolve.
It’s not surprising that Richard Thompson would write an old-time ballad about a motorbike. After all, as a founding member of the Fairport Convention in the 1960s, he was at the forefront of the English folk rock movement. According to one source, Thompson’s early group brought “a distinctively English identity to rock music and helped awaken much wider interest in traditional music in general.”
AllMusic.com points out that in his songwriting, Thompson has “long displayed a flair for adapting the tenets of the [English folk] style to his own contemporary works.” This song, says AllMusic.com, “takes a story old as the hills (good woman falls for noble criminal) and brings it into the present day without robbing it of a bit of its emotional power – and it has a killer guitar part to boot.” American Songwriter says of the ending, “Yes it’s a cliché, but Thompson imbues their last goodbye with such genuine emotion that it transcends all the times this story has been told before.”
The song, which has developed almost a cult-like following, was recorded as part of Thompson’s 1991 album, Rumor and Sigh. Time magazine included the song in its list of 100 songs since the magazine began publishing in 1923. Time says the song is “a glorious example of what one guy can accomplish with just a guitar, a voice, an imagination and a set of astonishingly nimble fingers.” The ballad, says Time, “takes you to the emotional edge of love and theft, then soars right over it.”
If you want to truly geek out on this amazing song, visit Sing Out! magazine for an incredibly thorough discussion of the way the song has evolved over years of performances, both by Thompson and by other musicians who have covered the song.
If you’re not familiar with Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” take a listen – and see if you don’t get a lump in your throat as James says goodbye to Red Molly and his fine motorbike. You can listen to the song online – but better yet, you might want to purchase Rumor and Sigh, the album on which he released “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” as there are lots of other great songs on the album as well. And if you fall in love with Richard Thompson’s music (and really, who wouldn’t?), you might want to add RT: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson, a five-CD box set that features classic, rare, and previously unreleased Thompson recordings. And if you want to learn to play like the fleet-fingered Thompson, check out his book Richard Thompson Teaches Traditional Guitar Instrumentals: Unique Arrangements of Irish, Scottish and English Tunes.
Visit thestoryweb.com/Thompson for links to all these resources and to watch Richard Thompson perform “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”
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This week on StoryWeb: Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
In honor of the winter solstice
Without a doubt, the most famous poem about winter is Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In fact, Garrison Keillor says that this is perhaps the single most famous poem of any kind in the twentieth century. Frost himself called the poem “my best bid for remembrance.”
Written nearly in the blink of an eye in June 1922 after Frost had been up all night finishing his long poem “New Hampshire,” the poem, said Frost, came to him nearly in an hallucination in just “a few minutes without strain.” It was published the next year in a collection of Frost poems also titled New Hampshire.
It’s likely that you know this beloved poem – and also that you know other Frost poems, such as “After Apple-Picking,” “Birches,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and of course “The Road Not Taken.” The thing about Frost’s poems is that they seem, at first glance, to be so simple, so straightforward.
In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the poem’s speaker is returning home from an errand of some sort on the “darkest evening of the year,” that is, the winter solstice. He and his horse stop by a wood filling with snow. The horse is impatient to get home, but the man is entranced by the snow piling up in the woods, “lovely, dark and deep.” Anyone who has witnessed a deep snow knows the muffled quiet, the hush that descends as the “downy flake[s]” fall, that magical feeling of being transported almost to another world. Since I live in Colorado, I get to enjoy many such snowfalls each year, and I often say it is like being in a snow globe.
But “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is not just about being in a snow globe in New Hampshire, lovely as that image is. No, anyone who’s read the work of Robert Frost knows that there’s usually more going on in a Frost poem than at first meets the eye. Here, we can’t help but be intrigued by the lines at the poem’s end: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.”
Perhaps these lines are literally about a busy man who needs to attend to his obligations and not tarry too long in this transcendent landscape. And maybe he is thinking prosaically about the long journey still ahead toward home.
But many readers have sensed that there is more at work here. Drawn into the otherworldliness of the dark woods filling up with snow, the speaker may be thinking on another level of the “sweet” relief that death may bring. Like sleep, death is a mystery, an unknowing, potentially a kind of oblivion that seems in some ways attractive to someone, like the poem’s speaker, who is too busy with obligations and errands. Might it be nice to simply succumb to these woods, “lovely, dark and deep” as they are?
Then again, maybe this is just a slice-of-life nature poem about appreciating a supremely beautiful winter landscape. A former colleague of mine from my days teaching at West Virginia’s Shepherd University emphatically told students that the poem is not about death as it does not explicitly mention this subject. For that professor, the poem is literally about the narrator needing to get home so he can sleep. But this professor also told students that any given poem has only one meaning and that it is the teacher’s job to ensure that students understand each poem’s single interpretation.
I am in a far different camp, as I believe that a rich poem can have multiple interpretations, maybe even contradictory meanings at the same time, that readers bring to the poem their own lives and experiences and that each reader has a unique experience of the poem. I ascribe to Archibald MacLeish’s philosophy: “A poem should not mean but be.”
To sample a few of the many interpretations Frost’s poem has elicited, visit the University of Illinois’s outstanding Modern American Poetry website, where you’ll find excerpts from a dozen or so scholars. One critic included here, Clint Stevens, writes, “There is in the end the uncertainty in choosing between his death impulse and his desire to continue on the road of life. Which wins in the end, I think I know, but it scarcely matters; the speaker has had his solitary vision; whether he stays or goes, the woods will go with him and the reader, who are now well-acquainted with the coming night.” Well said, Mr. Stevens. Well said.
To learn more about Frost, you might want to read the Poetry Foundation’s introduction to Frost’s work and philosophy. If you really want to delve into everything Frost, read Jay Parini’s outstanding biography, Robert Frost: A Life – and check out the Robert Frost postage stamp (along with other U.S. stamps dedicated to American poets!). The definitive collection of Frost’s poetry is The Poetry of Robert Frost.
Visit thestoryweb.com/snowy for links to all these resources and to watch Frost recite this marvelous poem. At the very least, hearing him read the words will transport you to a magical, snowy world. And it just might cause you to reflect on the power of life – and death – beyond yourself.
And the next time you are lucky enough to enjoy a lovely, deep snowfall, think of Frost’s poems. Happy winter, happy return of the light to all my StoryWeb listeners.
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This week on StoryWeb: Rick Nelson’s song “Garden Party.”
For Julia, in honor of her birthday
In 1972, my two-year-old sister could sing all the words to this Rick Nelson hit. Why she latched on to this particular song when it came on the car radio none of us will ever know – not even Julia. She would sit in her car seat – not one of the safety-conscious car seats of today – and practically dance in her seat, legs and arms bopping to the beat.
So “Garden Party” has a special place in my memories. But there’s an interesting story to the song itself as well.
Rick Nelson was, of course, one of two sons of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, famous stars of their own 1950s and 1960s television show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. To be an Ozzie or a Harriet, to be a Ricky or a David, to be a Nelson meant that you were part of a wholesome, all-American family. The Nelsons epitomized the white picket fence dream of Eisenhower’s America.
As a teen in the late 1950s, Ricky Nelson emerged as a rock-and-roll performer, with an emphasis on rockabilly. In short order, he became a teen idol. Though he officially changed his performance name to Rick Nelson in 1961 when he was 21, he would forever be known as “Ricky” by the many teen girls who had fallen in love with him.
With the onset of Beatlemania, Rick Nelson’s music fell out of popularity. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was still making music, recording in the country-rock genre emerging at the time. But his new music was not catching on in quite the way he hoped.
Things came to a head in 1971 when he performed at an oldies concert at Madison Square Garden. Other oldies artists – including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard – played the show, which was intended to showcase the music of a bygone era. Wearing bell bottoms and a purple velvet shirt and sporting long hair, Nelson at first played “Be-Bop Baby,” “Hello, Mary Lou,” and other old hits, but when he launched into a country version of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” the audience booed him off the stage.
Disgusted by what had happened at the show, he wrote “Garden Party,” weaving together references to musicians and songs performed at the concert. In an essay for Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Story Behind the Song, his son Gunnar Nelson recalls: “After a lifetime of pretending to be a character he wasn’t – wearing the sweater on Monday on the set of Ozzie and Harriet after being a real rock star on the weekends – he was writing and performing for his own pleasure and satisfaction.” Gunnar says one of his most prized possessions is his father’s handwritten lyrics to “Garden Party,” featured at SongFacts, which includes extensive background on the song and on Rick Nelson’s career. Nelson offers reminisces about the song in a 1983 interview.
I love that “Garden Party” tells a real story – and I also love that it allowed Rick Nelson to get the last laugh. Ironically, he is really known now mostly for this song – a tune about not having his music appreciated. Though he never regained his earlier popularity by the time he died in a plane crash in 1985 at age 45, it seems Rick Nelson had learned the real lesson from that experience at Madison Square Garden – to be true to yourself and to your creative vision.
For me, though, this song will always conjure up images of my beloved little sister, her big brown eyes and long, curly brown hair, her pumping arms and legs, and her two-year-old voice exclaiming, “You see you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
Visit thestoryweb.com/nelson for links to all these resources and to watch Rick Nelson play “Garden Party” on Midnight Special, hosted by Wolfman Jack.
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This week on Story Web: the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo.
I suppose I must have a dark sense of humor indeed to think of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo as a comedy – even if I do realize that it is a dark comedy. I mean, what can you say about someone who shrieks, then laughs uproariously, at the woodchipper scene?
Yes, Fargo is a weird and dark tale – from William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard, the pathetic car dealership manager who pays two sleazy criminals to kidnap his wife, to Steve Buscemi as the “funny-looking guy” in that criminal pair, from Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson, a pregnant police detective, to Steve Park as Mike Yanagita, the high school classmate who visits her in one of the film’s many bizarre scenes. All of the actors in the movie are outstanding, but my favorite by far is McDormand, who also happens to be married to Joel Coen and who acts in a number of the Coen Brothers’ films. Apparently, I am not alone in my assessment of McDormand’s portrayal of Marge Gunderson, as she won a Best Oscar Actress for this role.
Part of what made Fargo fascinating and compelling to me when I first saw it was the film’s opening claim that it is based on a true story. The viewer sees the following text on screen:
This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
But as it turns out, the story may not actually be true – or then again, it may be. The Coen Brothers have both asserted that it is true and laughed off questions about its veracity. As Ethan Coen says, “You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie.” Learn more about the truth or fiction of Fargo by visiting Snopes, the Huffington Post, and Film School Rejects.
Now if you haven’t seen Fargo, I don’t want to give anything away. Suffice it to say, watching Fargo won’t be your average viewing experience. And as you watch events unfold, you may be thinking, “She finds this funny?!” As I said, it’s a dark sense of humor that draws me to this film.
Fans of the Coen Brothers’ other films will know what I mean. From one of their earliest films, Raising Arizona, Joel and Ethan Coen have shown themselves to find humor in the strangest of settings. I know people who are such ardent fans of Raising Arizona that they can recite virtually every line, and that is even more the case with their cult classic The Big Lebowski (anyone for a White Russian?). Probably their “biggest” film to date is O Brother, Where Art Thou? It stars George Clooney as a modern-day Ulysses on an odyssey through the Depression-era South. Of course, laughs are once again in big supply.
To dig deeper into Fargo, check out The Atlantic’s in-depth consideration of the film that “brought it all together” for the Coen Brothers. You can watch a television interview with the Coen Brothers and Frances McDormand about Fargo, and you’ll also enjoy a short video about the seven things you probably didn’t know about Fargo. A great deal of dialogue from the film can be found at Wikiquote. To go all scholarly on the film, check out The Coen Brothers’ Fargo, a Cambridge Film Handbook.
To think more fully about the Coen Brothers’ long career in filmmaking, read The New Yorker’s assessment of their work. A three-minute video tribute to their many films is also available. You might also find it interesting to read Ian Nathan’s new book, The Coen Brothers: The Iconic Filmmakers and Their Work, or Mark T. Conard’s book The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Also useful is a collection of interviews with the Coen Brothers.
Of course, Fargo was so successful that it spawned a TV spin-off twenty years later! There are mixed reports about whether the Coen Brothers like the television series, but for my money, the original film is all you need. If you want to add Fargo to your DVD collection, consider buying Coen Brothers Collection, which includes Blood Simple, Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, and Raising Arizona. Or you might just want to stick with the special edition DVD of Fargo.
Visit thestoryweb.com/fargo for links to all these resources and to watch the scene in which police detective Marge Gunderson (played by Frances McDormand) says, “’m not so sure I agree 100% with your policework there, Lou.”
However you watch Fargo, just be sure to laugh. It’s not all grim and macabre – at least not to me!
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This week on StoryWeb: Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz,”
A story contained in sixteen short lines of poetry – that is Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” This autobiographical poem tells of a little boy dancing with his drunk father as his frowning mother looks on.
How to read this poem? Is the speaker a man looking back at his drunken father with affection or remembering the fear he felt at his father’s whiskey binges? Love and fear simultaneously?
There is mixed, conflicted affection in the poem. The boy hangs on “like death” and acknowledges that “such waltzing was not easy.” But he also mentions “[t]he hand that held my wrist” and says that his father “waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt.”
Despite the intimacy, however, it’s impossible not to notice the hard, nearly brutal images in the poem. The father dances around the room so roughly that pans slide off the kitchen shelf. The father’s hand is “battered.” The boy’s ear “scrape[s]” his father’s belt buckle. The father “beat[s] time on my head / With a palm caked hard by dirt.” These images hint of domestic violence – the father toward the boy or the father toward the mother, perhaps both.
However you read this poem, it is a poem of great intimacy – the grown man looking back at what passed for a close moment with his father. While it’s undeniable that the poem reveals the harsh side of the speaker’s father, the poem also reveals a tenderness between the father and the boy, the affection (if conflicted) the boy feels for the father.
Even the boy himself seems to wonder how he was supposed to feel. He’s “dizzy” – a state that can be good or bad. And he says, “Such waltzing was not easy.” As he dances a fragile dance between his father and his mother, he hangs on like death, clings to his father as best he can.
The title of the volume in which the poem appears – The Lost Son – may give us a clue as to how to read the poem, whether a fond remembrance of affection or a terrifying memory of fear. But even when we acknowledge that the “lost son” sounds negative, we are left with two opposing words: “lost” and “son.” Loss, abandonment, pain are acknowledged, but so too is the relationship of father and son. This volume of poetry, published in 1948, was Roethke’s breakthrough book.
The poem is likely based on Roethke’s own childhood. He was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, where his German immigrant father, Otto, owned and ran a twenty-five-acre greenhouse. When Roethke was fourteen, his father died of cancer and his uncle committed suicide. The great feeling of abandonment that sprang up in Roethke’s life intertwined with his own alcoholism and his profound struggles with manic depression. Despite this pain or perhaps because of it, Roethke’s poetry has an unusual power and grace.
To learn more about Roethke, visit the Poetry Foundation website, the Biography website, or the Modern American Poetry website. Poet Stanley Kunitz offers an insightful and heartfelt tribute to Roethke, and in an interview, Native American author Sherman Alexie acknowledges his debt to Roethke, saying that “I’ve spent my whole career rewriting ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ with an Indian twist.” These last two resources come from the outstanding Poetry Society of America website.
To explore Roethke’s poetry more fully, check out his collection The Waking, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954. It includes his famous title poem, which reads in part, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.” You might also enjoy The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke and Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke. If you are a writer, you’ll enjoy Roethke’s book On Poetry and Craft.
Visit thestoryweb.com/Roethke to listen to Theodore Roethke read “My Papa’s Waltz.” You can also watch a 1964 film about Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time, which features footage of Roethke reading selected poems, including “The Waking.”
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Lydia Maria Child: “Over the River and Through the Wood”
In the 19th century, Lydia Maria Child’s name was nearly a household word.
An outspoken abolitionist, women’s rights supporter, and crusader for Native American rights, Child was also a prolific author. A journalist and editor, she wrote novels and short stories (often using fiction to express her anti-slavery views), poems and children’s books, and domestic manuals for wives and mothers.
Her most famous book – which went into 33 printings – was The Frugal Housewife, first published in 1829. Four years later, she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, believed to be the first anti-slavery book published in the United States. She also served as editor for Harriet Jacobs’s influential 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In all, Child wrote more than 50 books.
Though Child was very prominent in her time, she comes down to us now primarily as the author of a poem originally published as “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day” – more popularly known to us as “Over the River and Through the Wood.” It was included in her 1844 book, Flowers for Children. The poem features Child’s reminiscences about visiting her grandfather’s house during the cold New England winters.
The Poetry Foundation, which credits her with being one of the most important American women writers of the 19th century, provides an outstanding overview of Child’s life and work, writing: “She wrote one of the earliest American historical novels, the first comprehensive history of American slavery, and the first comparative history of women. In addition, she edited the first American children's magazine, compiled an early primer for the freed slaves, and published the first book designed for the elderly.”
Two other excellent introductions to Child can be found at American National Biography Online and the History of American Women website. You can visit Transcendentalists.com to consider Child’s relationship to other New England thinkers and writers of the time. Her work is also included in the Library of Congress’s “American Women” project. Look for her especially in the section titled “Reform Efforts.”
If you want to go even further in your exploration of this key 19th-century writer, you might want to read Lori Kenschaft’s book Lydia Maria Child: The Quest for Racial Justice or Carolyn L. Karcher’s book The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. A Lydia Maria Child Reader is available. And believe it or not, you can still buy a copy of The American Frugal Housewife.
Not surprisingly, many children’s picture books have taken “Over the River and Through the Wood” as their subject. I am particularly taken with Mary Engelbreit’s version. Another lovely book is Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Poetry.
Wherever Thanksgiving Day finds you this year, take a moment to revisit Lydia Maria Child’s classic poem celebrating the holiday.
Visit thestoryweb.com/child for links to all these resources. Listen now as I read Lydia Maria Child’s 1844 poem “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day.”
The New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day
BY LYDIA MARIA CHILD
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way,
To carry the sleigh,
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather's house away!
We would not stop
For doll or top,
For 't is Thanksgiving day.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes,
And bites the nose,
As over the ground we go.
Over the river, and through the wood,
With a clear blue winter sky,
The dogs do bark,
And children hark,
As we go jingling by.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To have a first-rate play —
Hear the bells ring
Ting a ling ding,
Hurra for Thanksgiving day!
Over the river, and through the wood —
No matter for winds that blow;
Or if we get
The sleigh upset,
Into a bank of snow.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To see little John and Ann;
We will kiss them all,
And play snow-ball,
And stay as long as we can.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Trot fast, my dapple grey!
Spring over the ground,
Like a hunting hound,
For 't is Thanksgiving day!
Over the river, and through the wood,
And straight through the barn-yard gate;
We seem to go
Extremely slow,
It is so hard to wait.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Old Jowler hears our bells;
He shakes his pow,
With a loud bow wow,
And thus the news he tells.
Over the river, and through the wood —
When grandmother sees us come,
She will say, Oh dear,
The children are here,
Bring a pie for every one.
Over the river, and through the wood —
Now grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurra for the fun!
Is the pudding done?
Hurra for the pumpkin pie!
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This week on StoryWeb: Lee Smith’s memoir, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life.
I first fell in love with Lee Smith’s fiction nearly thirty years ago when I was a cook at Le Conte Lodge in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. On my afternoons off, I’d sit on my cabin porch, reading first Lee’s novel Oral History, later her novel Fair and Tender Ladies. She created characters with such powerful voices – women and men of Appalachia who spin yarns through story and song. Granny Younger’s voice and Ivy Rowe’s letters have stayed with me all these years.
The more I followed Lee’s career, the more I was drawn in. So it was an honor years later to edit a collection of previously published interviews with her. Gathering these interviews in Conversations with Lee Smith was like sitting on the porch drinking sweet tea and hanging out with a long-lost but beloved cousin.
Last year when Lee published her newest book, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, I was more than delighted. In the interviews I had collected, Lee had told bits and pieces of her story – but now came Dimestore, a collection of personal essays, roughly arranged in chronological order. Taken together, they read like a memoir.
The reader who picks up Dimestore will learn about growing up as an only child in Grundy, Virginia, her parents, Gig and Ernest, her time spent in her father’s Ben Franklin dimestore, her parents’ struggles with mental illness, and Lee’s resilient coping strategies. As the book goes on, the reader learns also about her son Josh and his diagnosis of schizophrenia at age eighteen. Along the way, the reader sees how Lee’s love of storytelling and passion for writing literally saved her life.
One essay in the book stands out for me above all the others. “A Life in Books” began as the keynote address at the 2007 meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). I was fortunate enough to meet my best friends, Amy Young and Jennifer Soule, in Atlanta for the conference. And of course, they were right there with me in the front row for Lee’s speech.
By this time, Lee and I had long since met and become friends, and we had talked about the mental illness that ran through both of our families over many generations. And I knew that her son Josh had recently died of complications of his schizophrenia. I had sent a card and made a donation to the group home where he lived.
But little did I expect that Lee would talk openly that night about the heartbreaking loss of Josh and about the role her writing played in helping her to recover her own life. I wasn’t the only one who was deeply moved by Lee’s honest account that evening. Indeed, there were no dry eyes in the auditorium as the audience leapt to its feet in a long-standing ovation.
I’m so glad to see Dimestore published. In addition to “A Life in Books,” which appears near the end of the book, I highly recommend the entire volume. The author of thirteen novels and four short story collections, Lee Smith leaves her fictional worlds behind and lets us see behind the curtains into her own life.
To learn more about Dimestore, read the Huffington Post’s interview with Lee Smith and Publisher’s Weekly interview with her, then listen to Diane Rehm’s interview with her as well as Frank Stasio’s North Carolina Public Radio conversation with her about the book. You’ll also delight in visiting Lee’s website. You can read excerpts from the book: “Raised to Leave: Some Thoughts on ‘Culture’” and “Finding My Way Home.” When you’re hooked (and I know you will be!), get your hands on a hard copy of Dimestore.
Visit thestoryweb.com/dimestore for links to all these resources and to listen to Lee Smith give her 2007 speech titled “A Life in Books,” published as an essay near the end of Dimestore.
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This week on StoryWeb: Jill Ker Conway’s memoir The Road from Coorain.
The Road from Coorain traces the unlikely story of young Jill Ker’s journey from a sheep station in the western grasslands of New South Wales, Australia, to the position of president of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Journeys of such epic proportions are rare even for the increasingly ubiquitous genre of memoir. But the young Jill – hemmed in by the extreme drudgery of sheep farming, the tedium of the dry, parched landscape of the Australian outback, and later by the emotional demands of her widowed mother, who had relocated the family to Sydney – dreams big dreams. From the family’s 30,000-acre property known as Coorain, a place so isolated that she was seven before she saw another girl child, Jill Ker travels first with her family to Sydney, then on her own to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to earn a PhD at Harvard University.
Though Jill Ker Conway’s most public triumph comes in her becoming the first woman to be named president of Smith College (arguably the most prestigious women’s college in the world), this memoir – the first of a trilogy – takes us back to her childhood, paints for us the picture of a life limited by her family circumstances, including her father’s death at Coorain when young Jill is just ten, and limited as well by the Australian society of the 1950s, a world that does not value women’s contributions.
Conway went on to write two other memoirs – True North and A Woman’s Education – which, taken together, tell the story of her marriage to Canadian professor John Conway and her singular accomplishments in higher education. A good introduction to these two memoirs, especially A Woman’s Education, can be found in Harvard Magazine.
Both True North and A Woman’s Education are satisfying reading indeed, particularly for those readers who get swept up by The Road from Coorain and want to know how it all turned out for the young Jill Ker.
But it is The Road from Coorain that stays with the reader most powerfully. In this stark but also lyric memoir, Conway brings us into her childhood on Coorain, the name coming from the Aboriginal word for “windy place.” She offers a rare glimpse into a way of life in Australia that few hardy souls have experienced – and a life that few have transcended so remarkably.
The New York Times review of the memoir’s publication in 1989 is insightful. If you want to dip your toe into The Road from Coorain, you can read an online excerpt from the book’s opening. But you’ll be hooked – believe me – so you’ll eventually want to get your hands on the book itself.
Visit thestoryweb.com/Conway for links to all these resources and to watch a five-minute clip from the Australian telefeature based on Jill Ker Conway’s memoir The Road from Coorain. You can then watch a seventeen-minute video interview conducted in 2011 with Conway.
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This week on StoryWeb: Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
For this spooky Halloween edition of StoryWeb, I’m featuring Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Everyone knows this haunting poem – but less well known is Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he explains how he quite methodically wrote the poem.
Now “The Raven,” you have to understand, made a splash. Poe was a relatively unknown writer when he published the poem in January 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror and again the next month in The American Review. Almost overnight, he became a huge literary sensation, though he didn’t make much money from it or his other writing. Readers just couldn’t get over the macabre poem.
Poe decided to ride the wave of the poem’s instant popularity, and a year later, he published “The Philosophy of Composition” in Graham’s Magazine. His account of how he wrote “The Raven” step by step is likely exaggerated – he makes it almost seem as if he was completing a paint-by-number artwork. Do this, do that – and voila, a wildly successful poem!
Read the essay to learn why he used certain vowel sounds (such as the long vowel sound in “Nevermore”), how he strove for “unity of effect,” and why he believed stories and poems should be short. If a person could read a poem or story in one sitting, Poe believed, the author could better control the unity of effect. If you want to terrify your reader, best to do it in one concentrated burst with every element of the poem or story contributing to that terror.
More than 150 years later, “The Raven” is still one of the most widely read poems in the English language. Some literary scholars lift a critical eyebrow about it, concluding that it is not fine literature. But as you listen to me read the poem in its entirety, are you really thinking about fine literature or are you just caught up in the creepy, eerie feeling it creates? Even Poe himself asserts that he set out to write a poem that would "suit at once the popular and critical taste."
This question of whether “The Raven” is fine literature goes to Poe’s entire body of work. Perhaps because he was so popular, some scholars call into question whether he can be seen as a serious artist. But to my mind, creating works that are accessible to a wide range of readers is a mark in his favor.
Not surprisingly, Poe’s explanation of how he wrote “The Raven” ended up being a footnote to the great poem itself. Few readers know – or even give much thought to – how Poe wrote the poem. They are too busy enjoying it!
The “unity of effect” Poe cites in “The Raven” is evident in his fiction as well. Another masterful piece suitable for Halloween is “The Tell-Tale Heart” – and it, too, utilizes unity of effect and is written so that it can be read in one suspenseful sitting. Every single word in this taut, hair-raising story contributes to the suspense, to the reader’s growing horror at what the narrator has done. Both “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are classic Poe.
Vincent Price has a great rendition of “The Raven,” and you might want to stop by the Poe Museum. A great volume to have in your collection is Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. If you still haven’t had enough Poe, check out Poe Illustrated, a collection of more than 100 images inspired by Poe’s work. A fun edition of “The Raven” is Christopher Wormell’s pop-up book, and there’s no end of Raven items you can buy: mugs, posters, T-shirts, and clocks. You can even buy an Edgar Allan Poe action figure! Visit thestoryweb.com/raven for links to all these resources.
Listen now as I read Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” in its entirety.
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This week on StoryWeb: Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas.
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is known for her stunning self-portraits. You might not think of her immediately as a painter who tells stories through her art. Indeed, you could be forgiven if you think of her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, as the more narrative painter of the two. After all, his paintings told tales of the Mexican Revolution.
But Kahlo’s paintings tell a tale – the same tale – over and over again, nearly obsessively, as if Kahlo had a compulsive need to share her story.
For the tale she told in so many of her paintings was the devastating effect a serious bus accident had on her body and her simultaneous refusal to let that accident define her life.
The accident she endured – and the injuries that resulted – are almost too gruesome to imagine. As a university student, she was on a bus when it collided with a streetcar. Several people were killed, and though Kahlo survived, she suffered an almost incomprehensible injury: she was impaled – through her pelvis – on an iron handrail.
Kahlo spent the rest of her life recovering from the accident. She was eighteen when she was injured. She was forty-seven when she died. In those intervening decades, she experienced excruciating pain and was sometimes confined to plaster corsets that left her lying on her back for months at a time. As one of her friends said, Kahlo “lived dying.”
Though Kahlo had been at the university to prepare for medical school, during her long recovery she found herself drawn to painting. Ultimately, she was extremely driven to be a painter, and even though she was flat on her back for months at a time, she rigged up a mirror and a canvas and painted portraits of herself as she appeared lying in bed.
Of her approximately two hundred paintings, many were self-portraits – and these are the images that stay with us today. She said, “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”
One of the most compelling of her many self-portraits is “The Two Fridas,” a double self-portrait she painted in 1939, the year she was divorced from Diego Rivera (before remarrying him in 1940). While most of Kahlo’s paintings were small (precisely the opposite of her husband’s grand murals), “The Two Fridas” was her first large-scale painting. It was also the painting for which she received the most money in her lifetime.
The painting indicates a split in Kahlo’s identity. The Frida on the left appears in a Victorian white dress, representing, some art historians have suggested, her paternal German heritage and her European-influenced, elite, privileged upbringing. The Frida on the right appears in the traditional indigenous clothing of a Mexican peasant, suggesting her maternal Mestiza ancestry, which she embraced as a key part of her involvement in the Mexican Revolution. Many Mexican women artists and intellectuals were also dressing in Mexican peasant clothing to emphasize their indigenous ancestry. Dressing this way was an immediate, powerfully visual way to declare one’s allegiance to the Mexican Revolution. Kahlo became known in her art for depicting herself in traditional clothing – and very well known in her life for her embrace of indigenous clothing and accessories. She wore long and colorful skirts and dresses, elaborate headdresses in her hair, and striking traditional jewelry. The reason for the indigenous clothing and jewelry is not hard to understand. The Mexicanidad movement was rejecting European colonialism and elevating the traditional folk culture of Mexico. As Kahlo said, she wished “to be worthy, with my paintings, of the people to whom I belong and to the ideas which strengthen me.”
A striking element in The Two Fridas is the broken blood vessel that connects the hearts of the two Fridas. It is not hard to see Kahlo’s references to her life of constant pain and suffering, a life that was marked by thirty-two separate surgeries to correct the injuries she sustained during the bus accident. Kahlo also indicated that the painting was a way of mourning her separation from Diego Rivera, to make vivid her broken heart, the feeling of being split in two. The Frida in the white dress may be independent and fierce, but the traditional Frida – as encouraged by her husband, whose portrait she holds in her hand – has embraced a revolutionary identity. Which Frida is the real Frida? This search for self-identity was at the center of so much of Kahlo’s work throughout her life. The fact that the two Fridas are set against the background of an intensely stormy sky indicates that this quest for self-understanding caused a great deal of turmoil for Kahlo.
To learn more about Kahlo, you’ll definitely want to watch Frida, a 2002 film starring Salma Hayek as the artist. The film is a good introduction to Kahlo’s larger-than-life tale: her accident and its aftermath; her stormy marriage to Rivera, who was more than twenty years her senior and a very famous artist when he met the then-unknown Kahlo; his love affairs as well as hers, including one with Leon Trotsky; and her ability to hold court and be a very powerful and commanding presence despite her physical limitations. More than anything, though, Frida will introduce you to Kahlo’s marvelous work as a painter.
Another interesting take on the couple known by the Mexican press simply as “Diego and Frida” is Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna. Told from the perspective of a fictional assistant to the artists, the novel offers a bird’s-eye view of the famous pair.
While the petite and physically frail Kahlo was largely overshadowed (both literally and figuratively) by her near giant of a husband, interest in her work surged in the late 1970s and has only gained momentum in the years since. The resulting cultural phenomenon is sometimes called “Fridamania” – as her face, her paintings, and her story have swept popular culture. Today, you can buy not only Frida Kahlo posters but also Frida Kahlo home furnishings, hair accessories, and clothes. You can easily find a shower curtain, an action figure, a magnetic dress-up play set, socks, and of course, calendars featuring images from her various self-portraits. Interestingly, the Frida Kahlo Corporation controls access to images of the famed artist. Through the corporation, you can get credit cards, tequilla, and more – all emblazoned with Kahlo’s licensed image.
To round out your exploration of this phenomenal Mexican artist, you’ll want to visit the official Frida Kahlo website. Other valuable resources on Kahlo are the excellent Wikipedia post about her; an entry on Biography.com; and the BBC’s article “13 Things You Didn’t Know about Frida Kahlo.” To go in depth, check out Hayden Herrera’s biography, Frida. And most importantly, to view the paintings, you’ll want to visit the galleries at FridaKahlo.org, the Frida Kahlo Foundation, and WikiArt.
Visit thestoryweb.com/kahlo to watch actual footage of Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera. Then watch a clip from Julie Taymor’s 2002 film, Frida. In this scene, Frida attends her Mexican exhibition against all odds.
“I am not sick. I am broken,” Kahlo said near the end of her life. “But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.” The last words in her diary were: “I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.”
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This week on StoryWeb: The Partridge Family’s song “I Think I Love You.”
Fifth grade – and the song I can’t get out of my head is “I Think I Love You.” Every girl at Griffith Elementary School – make it every girl at schools around the United States – feels the same way. How we swooned over David Cassidy, the teen idol who played a made-for-TV band’s lead singer.
The fictional band was The Partridge Family, based loosely on the real-life Cowsills, a family pop band popular in the late ’60s. The TV show debuted in fall 1970, just a month after “I Think I Love You” had been released as a single. The show featured Shirley Jones as a widowed mother of five children, who scheme to put together a band as a way of helping the family financially. Amazingly enough, this unknown family band has its debut at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas! Jones’s real-life stepson, David Cassidy, played Keith, the oldest of Shirley Partridge’s children. Susan Dey, Danny Bonaduce, and two younger children rounded out the family cast.
Like many girls my age, I tuned in every Friday night to The Partridge Family. In fact, it was the first show my family watched when we got our first color TV. We were watching Shirley Partridge and her kids, when the camera zoomed in for a very tight close-up of Shirley Jones’s face, complete with bright orange – nearly neon orange – lipstick. What a thing to see on a color set! My younger brother exclaimed, “Look at them lips!” And with that the TV sparked and went dead. No more Partridge Family. We have laughed ever since about those technicolor lips of Shirley Jones.
Although the actors “performed” songs as part of the show, most of them were actually lip-syncing. The only actors who performed in the band were David Cassidy, as lead singer, and Shirley Jones, who sang backup. So the 45s and albums that my friends and I purchased with our allowance money didn’t actually feature Susan Dey and Danny Bonaduce, but instead were the product of an anonymous studio band. This made no difference to us – for it was David Cassidy we wanted, and he was there front and center.
Though fifth-grade girls could not have known – yet – that pressing, anxious, heart-stopping feeling you get when you are falling in love but haven’t yet “confessed” that love, we nevertheless gladly sang along. Of course, like every school girl, I dreamed that Keith/David was singing that song to me. That was the magic of the song: this cute, cute heartthrob seemed to be confessing his love to me – and I loved him right back.
Unbelievably, “I Think I Love You” – a song by a fictitious band – hit #1 on the Billboard charts. Since 1970, there have been many cover versions, including those by Andy Williams, Perry Como, Paul Westerberg, and David’s daughter Katie Cassidy. David Cassidy himself recorded an updated solo version in 2003.
To go behind the scenes with the Partridge Family, check out Shirley Jones’s 2014 memoir or one of David Cassidy’s two books: C’mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus and Could It Be Forever? My Story. You might want to visit David Cassidy’s official website. To get the original version of “I Think I Love You,” you can buy the group’s first album, simply titled The Partridge Family Album. The complete TV series is available on DVD.
Visit thestoryweb.com/partridge for links to all these resources and to see The Partridge Family perform “I Think I Love You” as part of the episode titled “My Son, the Feminist.”
I’m under no illusion that The Partridge Family was great television or that the music released under their moniker was any good. But I can say that I still know every single word to “I Think I Love You” and that I am willing to belt it out if ever I am asked. My fifth-grade self would be proud.
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