Friday Frivolity no. 29: 4 Books I Read in February
the rainbow, the sisters, the red & the black, and the coordinating principle of literature
This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you'll get a little micro-essay, plus a mood board, 3 things I'm currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I've been reading lately, a shimmer of poetry, a "beauty tip," and a question to spark your thought.
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4 Books I Read in February
The Rainbow
I first read The Rainbow in college, and I was inspired to reread it earlier this month when ars poetica mentioned it in a newsletter as D.H. Lawrence’s “impossibly perfect novel.” If one does not find it “impossibly perfect,” there is no denying that it it is vital, poetic, thrumming and humming with life, alive in every syllable and word. It is a book with blood surging hot and strong through its veins.
The Rainbow begins in the 1840s and ends in 1905, chronicling three generations of the Brangwen family, who live in rural England, near Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence himself grew up in a coal mining town. In the first generation there are Tom Brangwen and Lydia, a Polish widow with a young daughter, Anna. Tom and Lydia marry, but their intimacy, their sharing in one another and understanding of one another, occurs only sporadically, until a revelation springs up between them and allows them to become “doorways” to each other. Then we learn about Anna, her girlhood, the relationship that springs up between her and her cousin Will. Will and Anna marry, but they become locked into conflict almost immediately; their conflict stems from fundamental character differences and cannot be smoothed over easily. But they learn, more or less, to live with one another, and their physical intensity produces children, the first of whom is Ursula.
It is Ursula Brangwen who is the point of arrival of all this forward motion of generations and passion. She has a relationship with Anton Skrebensky, but they are further apart than even Will and Anna: there is destruction here, agony, darkness. Ursula has other other relationships, with women; in spite of her parents’ dissuasion, she seeks out a career as a schoolteacher and, in spite of the uncongeniality of the role, she ekes out her own financial independence.
No writer can touch Lawrence when it comes to desire, the animal passion of sexual love. In The Rainbow he does it without vulgarity or silliness, grafting bodily sensations to heightened emotional experience and the symbolism of elemental images—light and darkness, sea and moonlight—revealing desire in its full spiritual force, an energy that pulses and throbs, mysterious and yet working through human life with its sacred power. But what stood out to me this time were the passages not concerned with desire: Ursula’s experiences at school and the simultaneously repulsive and triumphant experience of disciplining children; the carefully drawn sketches of “glimmering dusk” and “pale drops of flowers.” Then, of course, there is the vision of the rainbow at the end—but for that you will have to read the book.
The Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney, Minnie Astor Fosburgh: the Life and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters by David Grafton
Babe Paley has been a fashion icon of mine for a long time, one of those stylish women whose elegance and good taste seems a product of a bygone era, impossible to recapture or recreate. The Sisters chronicles the life and times of the three “fabulous Cushing sisters,” of which Babe, along with older sisters Betsey and Minnie, comprised. Daughters of famed Harvard neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing and Katharine Crowell Cushing, they grew up in a large, handsome house in Brookline with two brothers. Dr. Cushing spent long hours at the hospital, and so it fell to Kate to make sure that her daughters made the best of their beauty and good breeding. The career she picked out for them was marriage; succeed they must.
And succeed they would: Betsey, the middle sister, became the sisters’ launching pad when at 22 she married James Roosevelt, son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would fortuitously go on to become President. Through Betsey’s connections, the eldest sister Minnie met and married Vincent Astor, heir of a $200 million fortune, and then Babe, the youngest, married Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, Jr. This was just round one. Betsey’s marriage with James fell apart; she found and caught a bigger fish in the form of John Hay Whitney. So, too, did Babe’s with Stanley Mortimer; she severed this blue-blooded tie to bind herself to the fabulous wealth of CBS founder Bill Paley. Minnie’s second round, according to such standards, brought her down a rung, but she always had a passion for art, and with painter and art collector James Fosburgh, she was able to become the hostess of one of Manhattan’s best salons.
Reading The Sisters, I related to Minnie’s love of art, was still in awe of Babe’s perfect taste, swanlike grace, and genius for style, but ultimately decided that if I had to be one sister, it would be Betsey. She had the houses and the gardens and the dresses and the Renoirs and the yachts and what the other two did not have and money cannot buy, love and happiness. To love and be loved is gold, all else is gilding.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
These French novels always seem to ramble through the life of some not quite sympathetic person and end in a place not quite satisfactory. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this novel, mostly because I found it very funny. Our hero is Julien Sorel, the son of a humble sawmill owner. Intelligent, well-read, and ambitious (his hero is Napoleon, unfortunately in post-Napoleonic France), he decides to embark on a religious career in order to climb up the ranks of society, using his party trick of having memorized the Bible—in Latin—as a ticket to the upper echelons.
The first rung of Julien’s social climbing is his position tutoring the children of his small town’s mayor. There he develops a mutual attraction with the mayor’s wife, Madame de Rênal, and slowly, gradually, rather clumsily seduces her. Next, after a brief stint at a seminary in the larger town of Besançon, he is recommended to the aristocratic Marquis de la Mole to become his personal secretary and moves up to the big city of Paris. The upper classes repulse him, and yet he wants to be part of them. He has a strange seduction with the Marquis’s daughter, Mathilde, who, unlike the guileless, natural, provincial Madame de Rênal, is self-conscious, cerebral, and haughty. The worse Julien treats her, the more she falls for him, and the more he reveals his passion for her, the less attractive he becomes in her eyes. Their romance, with its back-and-forths and its contrivances of passion and its dramatic slashing-offs of hair, is hilarious; at the end of their first night together, Mathilde reflects that she had not experienced “the perfect bliss depicted in novels” and wonders to herself, “Could it be that I’m not in love with him after all?”
As a character, Julien is too calculating to be likable and yet not calculating enough to realize his schemes. Like the aristocrats who disgust him, he is a hypocrite. He has learnt the whole Bible by heart and yet without having gained much of its spiritual feeling; he sincerely loves a woman he isn’t faithful to. Yet his story is absorbing, and perhaps the most direct declaration of its authors aims in writing it come when Stendhal tells us,
A novel is a mirror going along a main road. Sometimes it reflects into your eyes the azure of the sky, sometimes the mud of the quagmires on the road. And the man carrying the mirror in the basket on his back gets accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror! You’d do better to accuse the road where the quagmire is, and better still the inspector of roads who allows the water to stagnate and the quagmire to form.1
Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology by Northrop Frye
This is a book of literary criticism, a collection of essays on writers from Spenser and Shakespeare through to James Joyce and Wallace Stevens. Frye begins with the idea that literary criticism could be, at least partially, a science, but “what is at present missing from literary criticism is a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.” For Frye, this coordinating principle is myth. Whether we are dealing with Homer and the classical world or the Amherst of Emily Dickinson, a series of common archetypes and images underlie the work of all poets, often related to the cycles of nature. Frye’s insights into the individual writers not only demonstrate this theoretical framework in practice but elucidate elements unique to each writer’s particular mythopoetic world, like a guide taking us on a tour through fairyland. As a critic, he’s learned but accessible, thorough without being obscure, and not without touches of humor. I loved the essay on Lord Byron in particular, the way that Frye braids together the poet’s verse, life, and historical context to tell us how this inimitable man “released a mainspring of creative energy in modern culture,” an energy that was called Romantic.
Mood Board of the Week
(left to right, top to bottom)
Marjorie Skouras’s 19th-century mansion in Mérida, Mexico, photographed by John Ellis for Architectural Digest: Marjorie Skouras is a decorator and product designer who bought a dilapidated Mexican colonial house with her husband in the Centro Histórico of Mérida, Mexico. Skouras fell in love with its pistachio-green façade and Art Nouveau influence. The renovation was a long, painstaking process, but the final result—complete with Skouras’s own colorful, eclectic touches—brought the home’s previous owners to tears when they visited. Perhaps because of last week’s pink theme, I was instantly drawn to this room, with its pink walls and pink settee, allowing a bottle-green, fish-shaped majolica table and a watermelon-colored lampshade, complete with three seeds, to stand out.
Marjorie Skouras's home, photographed by John Ellis Jacob Jongert, cover for Wendingen, Series 5, no. 1 (1923): Wendingen, published from 1918 to 1932, was a Dutch magazine focused on architecture and interior design. It was notable for its striking graphic design and typography. Here I love the simplicity of Jongert’s design— the pared-down flower at the center, the minimal use of color, the negative space—which was based on the stained glass windows of Richard Roland Holst, an artist and designer Jongert worked with and learned much from. Look closely at the flower, and the red design at the center is actually a stylized rendering of the name “Roland Holst.”
Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in Agnès Varda’s The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993): When her husband, Jacques Demy, was making one of my favorite films, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Agnès Varda was hard at work documenting the process, which later became The Young Girls Turn 25 (1993). For the documentary, made for Rochefort’s 25th anniversary, she combined archival footage and interviews with the film’s actors and residents of Rochefort. The atmosphere on set seems to have been close, friendly, lighthearted, as playful as the film itself. Lifelong romances began during filming. Playing sisters, real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac were as charming behind camera as they were on camera. Unfortunately, Dorléac would turn 25 and remain 25 forever: at the height of her career, she lost control of her Renault 10, hit a signpost near Nice, burst into flames, and died, leaving Deneuve—and Varda and Demy—to carry on her legacy.
Jaques Demy with Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac Janet Laing photographed by Etheldreda Laing in Oxford ca. 1914: Etheldreda Laing and her husband lived in Oxford, where Etheldreda became interested in the nascent technology of photography in the 1890s. She had a darkroom built in their house, and she adopted color early on, in 1907, when the Autochrome process, patented by the Lumière brothers, first became available. One of her favorite subjects was her daughters, and she loved photographing them in the garden, enjoying the sunshine among the flowers, on benches, under parasols, surrounded by lush greenery.
Eric Ravilious, Two Woman in a Garden (1933): All of a sudden, a couple of days ago, the temperature rose, the ice on the pond began to thaw, and snow started running in rivulets down the streets and into the dull grass, mixing dirt and slush into a squelching mud. A premonition of spring—early, to be sure, but enough to put me in mind of April tulips and green gardens. In this painting by British painter, illustrator, and engraver Eric Ravilious (1903–1942), two women sit in a lush green garden, quietly enjoying the protective shade of a large tree and the wind through the grass, an umbrella forgotten and quite discarded. The two women are Tirzah Garwood, Ravilious’s wife, also a painter, and Charlotte Bawden, wife of Edward Bawden, also both artists.
art by Charlotte Bawden and Tirzah Garwood Dreams (1990): Akira Kurosawa was one of my father’s favorite directors, and we watched and enjoyed so many of his films together. Released in 1990, Dreams was one of Kurosawa’s last movies, and it was one of the last movies my father saw. Here the lyrical, romantic elements of Kurosawa’s filmmaking—as in the scene in Seven Samurai when the young apprentice samurai Katsushiro suddenly finds himself in a wood of white flowers and seems to have lapsed into another world—finally find release from the chains of plot and are free to be simply images, fragments, pieces of a poetic pottery. In one of the film’s eight vignettes, Kurosawa suddenly takes us to France, where we meet Vincent van Gogh, played by—of all people—Martin Scorsese. Here Kurosawa replicates what was thought to be van Gogh’s final painting, Wheatfield with Crows, painted exactly a century earlier, in 1890.
Audrey Hepburn at the grocery store with her pet deer, Pippin, in 1958, photographed by Bob Willoughby: In 1958, Audrey Hepburn was making the film Green Mansions, directed by her then-husband Mel Ferrer. In the film, a young woman living in the Venezuelan jungle is followed around by a fawn, and the animal trainer on set recommended Hepburn bond with the fawn by taking her home with her. Hepburn nicknamed the fawn, Pippin, “Ip,” had a custom bathtub built for her, slept with her, and took her to parties and to grocery stores in Beverly Hills. Hepburn was heartbroken when she had to part with Ip at the end of filming; a year later, she had a miscarriage and Ferrer tracked down and took Ip back in as a pet. This, of course, could not help sparking envy in Hepburn’s Yorkshire Terrier, Mr. Famous.
Audrey Hepburn with Pippin in 1958, photographed by Bob Willoughby Leon Berkowitz, Source III (1976): Leon Berkowitz (1911–1987) was an American painter who lived in Washington D.C. after WWII and co-founded the Washington Workshop Center, which gathered together a variety of artists associated with Color Field painting, a style of painting characterized by large, unbroken surfaces of color. Although Berkowitz eschewed the “Color School” label, his paintings are beautiful, dreamy studies in color, where diffusions of various hues and shades melt into one another and seem to emanate an energy of their own. “I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color,” Berkowitz said.
Toshiro Mifune in Venice: When I think of Kurosawa, thoughts of the inimitable Toshiro Mifune are never far behind.Whether he’s playing a medieval almost-samurai (Seven Samurai), a gruff 19th-century doctor (Red Beard), or a small-time, alcoholic, postwar yakuza (Drunken Angel). Here he is in Venice, drifting along on a gondola, smoking a cigarette, casually being a beacon of light for well-dressed men everywhere.
Three Things I’m in Love With This Week
Substack edition!
For the past couple of months, my reading on Substack has taken a significant dip. But I’ve been trying to rectify that and catch up, since there’s so much good writing and thinking here, so many people creating and studying and learning and teaching, so much sparking of the imagination and intellect. Here are a few Substack reads I’ve enjoyed lately:
“The Chungus Era” by Henry Begler: Patricia Lockwood is a writer who has fascinated me; I read her collection of poems Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals as a teenager, when it first came out in 2014. Lockwood’s verse is nothing if not original—and yet, was it good? Her poem “Rape Joke” was what first put her on the map; it foreshadowed the #MeToo movement perfectly. Lockwood herself, as Begler notes, was the “poet laureate” of “pre-Musk Twitter.” But now that that movement, now that that era have passed, we can look at Lockwood’s work with clearer eyes, which is exactly what Begler proceeds to do here. After criticizing her criticism, he goes onto evaluate her novel No One Is Talking About This, a novel I started several times but gave up on because the style grated on me. I like reading reviews of novels I’ve passed over; usually they confirm that I was right to have passed over said novel, or at least save me time by combining summary, analysis, opinion, and just a relevant enough sprinkle of actual quotations, all neatly wrapped up with a bow. One benefits more from reading good novels than one benefits from reading criticism of good novels; one benefits more from reading criticism of mediocre novels than one benefits from reading mediocre novels.
“New Romanticisms” by Sam Jennings: Sam Jennings begins with the idea of history as a palimpsest: the Romantics knitted together disparate elements from previous eras that resonated with them. Weighed down by all this history, weighed down by all this art and culture, it’s harder for us to do the same, but the only other option is drifting into the brainless laziness of AI and social media, allowing our culture to dissipate and our literature to become increasingly irrelevant. For Jennings, everything is in fact literature because everything can be read—“all things are imaginatively reducible to literature… you yourself will have to read something, and read it deeply, or you’ll never understand your place in the world.” What we need now is to move away from technology and embrace thought, memory, work, the “endless play and unfettered imagination” that art consists of.
Emily Spinach’s translation of Sir Orfeo: Spinach says that Sir Orfeo is the Middle English text that she recommends most to people, and after reading it I can see why. It was an especially wonderful discovery for me because of the poetry collection I’ve been working on based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. No matter how many times the story is retold, whether through Gluck’s 18th-century opera, Marcel Camus’s 1950s Brazilian Carnival film, or Anaïs Mitchell’s 2010 folk album, it never fails to move me, retaining its ancient poignance while adapting to a startling variety of contexts. Here Orpheus (“Orfeo”) and Eurydice (“Lady Heurodis”) are a medieval king and queen, and instead of being bitten by a snake and ending up in the Underworld, Eurydice is visited in sleep by a strange fairy king, tears at her face until it bleeds, and is spirited away into fairyland. Spinach’s translation makes the poem direct (“Well then—it was the start of May”), immediate (“When he played, the melody of his voice / built a better world….”), and sometimes funny (“but that city is called Winchester now / (it’s definitely Winchester).)” It’s readable, fascinating, and very entertaining.
Orpheus mosaic from Sicily
Words of Wisdom
“You cannot live life according to a pattern. You can only prepare yourself for the unexpected by a long and continuous state of wonder.”
— Anaïs Nin, Journals of Anaïs Nin, 1927-1931
The past half-year or so for me has consisted of nothing but the unexpected. So I have decided to accept this “long and continuous state of wonder” in the hopes that these shocks, good or bad, may be taken in stride. Wonder, after all, is a happy state, a state of relinquishing oneself to something larger, greater, more mysterious, a state of accepting the things we do not understand.
Poetry Corner
“With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe, Come softly swimming downe along the Lee; Two fairer Birds I yet did neuer see: The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew, Did neuer whiter shew, Nor Joue himselfe when he a Swan would be For loue of Leda, whiter did appeare: Yet Leda was they say as white as he, Yet not so white as these, nor nothing neare; So purely white they were, That euen the gentle streame, the which them bare Seem’d foule to them, and bad his billows spare To wet their silken feathers, least they might Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre, And marre their beauties bright, That shone as heauens light, Against their Brydale day, which was not long: Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.”
—Edmund Spenser, from “Prothalamion”
Frye’s chapter on Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the sight of two swans on a pond the other day reminded me of one of my favorite Spenser poems, “Prothalamion.” Written for the double marriage of sisters Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset to Sir Henry Guildford and William Petre, 2nd Baron Petre respectively, “Prothalamion” must be one of the sweetest and happiest poems in the English language. Indeed, there is a point near the end of the poem where, describing a “stately place” on the banks of the Thames, the speaker laments the dissipation of a lord’s favor he had once known; however, he is determined not to let the joyful occasion be marred by anything less joyful—“But Ah, here fits not well / Olde woes but ioyes to tell.”
One of these “ioyes” is the sight of two swans gliding down the river. Their feathers are so white they out-white the snow of Mt. Pindus, so white they surpass the god Jove himself when he turned into a swan to woo Leda, the result of which union was Helen of Troy, so white the poet is afraid the river’s waters will “Soyle their fayre plumes” and stain them. Finally, this bright white becomes an image of “heauens light” itself, presiding over the “Brydale day” and imbuing it with bridal blessings.
Beauty Tip
A real beauty tip this time: my husband has convinced me to start using olive oil on my face instead of moisturizer; this week, after weeks if not months of skepticism, I finally acquiesced, and all of the little patches I was told were eczema disappeared.
Lingering Question
What are some of the earliest harbingers of spring in your part of the world?
Dear Readers, I hope you enjoyed this post! Leave a like, share with a friend, and as always, please let me know your thoughts in the comments—I always look forward to hearing from you!
The Red and the Black, translated by Catherine Slater.