Artists at work

NYRB is publishing translations of Tove Jansson’s writing that haven’t been available before in English, and we’re so lucky.

I loved the first memoir I read, The Summer Book, reflecting the memories of a child. Now I’ve read her adult memoir entitled Fair Play. The books are very different, written in differing styles, but they form parts of a while.

The first is a wonderful retelling of the feelings, images, and myths of childhood. The second is a matter-of-fact recounting of how two artists live and work together — and the give and take required to make that work.

“Fair Play” here means balancing needs, creating companionship without getting in each other’s way – and not using weaknesses against each other.

The stories illuminate the understanding, civility, silence, distance and patience between these two women, and the quirks that must be allowed for.

My favorite passage was the story of the chaos her partner creates when rearranging artwork on the walls and then the amazing change it makes when she’s finally completed her work and the juxtaposition of pieces changes their impact and meaning. The scenes set in a hotel in the USA while they traveled cross-country on a Greyhound bus were funny and interesting too, rather like one’s own travel journals, strange and interesting things happen, but is it a story? Does it round itself off? Perhaps it’s simply an anecdote to retell years later.

The tension of trying to be there for your partner, while focusing on your art wholeheartedly, touched and inspired me.

Brontë action figures! You know you want them

In honor of the bio-flick on tonight on the local PBS station – all the Brontës — all of them! I bring you one of my all time favorite U-Toob videos.
For that Gothic Transformer kind of mood.

Follow up 9/23: I watched the film and it was a horrible disappointment. I wasn’t too surprised, considering the anti-feminist writer they thought suitable for the job (she did the *Amazing Mrs. Pritchard* which set back women in politics by about 50 years, and no, it wasn’t even funny.). Amazing how they always choose the woman who won’t threaten patriarchal assumptions too much (“of course the brother is more important”).

Instead of examining how the shared imaginative lives of all the Brontë children created a unique imaginative and literary education, the film fed us scene after scene of Branwell’s self-destruction, unending and boring stupors and rages, once again relegating the 3 most astonishing British writers of the 19th-Century to secondary characters in the story of their feckless brother. Even now.

Honestly, the action figure clip is a better introduction to their writing.

Something to cheer us all up

Last week was really, really hard. I am not even sure why, except for a horrible confluence of problems with getting my taxes done (other people) and work (other people) and suddenly the phone ringing off the hook with people wanting stuff (other people)! There may be a pattern here.

I still feel a bit peaky this week and need cheering up. Here’s a link to a lovely essay by Ms. Ursula K. LeGuin, one of my favorite writers, wherein she explains why she is a man. This is something all of us of a certain age understand.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am him, as in “If anybody needs to throw up he will have to do it in his hat,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

Introducing Myself (pdf) by U.K. Le Guin.

Available in The Wave in the Mind, Shambhala, 2004.

Please breathe deeply and enjoy.

(Photo Dan Tuffs/Getty)

Happy Birthday, Olive Schreiner

It was after I decided to write my M.A. thesis on Olive Schreiner that I became acutely aware of how effectively women writers are “disappeared” by the male literary canon. Yes, it happens to all writers to some degree, as fashions change, but the disappearance of once famous women is much more dramatic. The uppity Monstrous Regiment of Women are put back in their place, their contributions mocked if remembered at all. I was amazed to discover that Schreiner’s essays and novels had once been read all over the world; that she had met Gandhi in South Africa, had influenced Stephen Crane, had had an influential role in the British and South African movements for women’s suffrage. How had I never heard about her before? I kept finding her unaccredited picture in photos of women’s suffrage marches in Britain (at 4′ 11″ with a very pointy nose, she was easy to spot) and references to her in the papers of the famous of the time. Women writers who embodied the cause of their times seem especially susceptible to revisionist rancor, and there’s no question she was an oddity. She wrote about race and class and feminism, but her preoccupations were just as much on the spiritual and moral plane. I finally decided her writing embodied a tragic philosophy, in the way Dostoevsky’s fiction and Nietzsche’s writings did. She was a spiritual evolutionist, a transcendental feminist. Even in her time she was hard to classify, but Virginia Woolf’s parents made sure she was taken to tea to meet the famous author, when she was only a child. It rankled her later that the child had been in no position to ask the questions she later had as an adult.

Born to missionary parents in British South Africa, before South Africa as we know it today even existed, her biggest literary influences were not novels, but rather the philosophical musings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herbert Spencer, the author of Spiritual Evolution. She theorized, with the urgency of her time, about what should replace our moral compass in a world where pressure from science and evolutionary theory rendered belief in the conventional idea of God no longer possible. Like Thoreau, Emerson, and Spencer, she replaced God with Nature, and with human intelligence that can see for itself the logic of cause and effect teaching us what we should and should not do, for our own sanity.

The Story of an African Farm is a strange and wonderful book, passionately felt, with an extended parable in the middle, written in Biblical language that completely flummoxed the modern Marxist feminists I read. Schreiner’s sophisticated writings on feminism, economics, and colonialism were comprehensible to them. But the acute spiritual pain she was addressing, her need to replace timeworn pieties with something vital and alive confuses feminists today. At the time, this was as urgent as the political struggles of the suffragettes.

That was part of what prompted me to write about her; it’s rare in graduate school to come across a book or writer where the literary critics all seem to get it wrong. The two exceptions were South African women themselves: Doris Lessing wrote a brilliant essay on the landscape, physical and emotional, that shaped Schreiner and it’s still one of the best essays on Schreiner’s most famous novel, The Story of an African Farm.

The other was Ruth First, who wrote the definitive biography at the time I was writing. When the biography was published, she was an ANC member, working from exile in Zimbabwe before she was killed by a letter bomb from the apartheid government’s secret police. She addressed Schreiner’s writing with great empathy and insight into the moral and social dilemmas Schreiner tried to address in her work.(Ruth First was portrayed by Barbara Hershey in the film A World Apart.)

Schreiner’s other attraction for me was the brilliance of her social analysis of women’s place as mediated by economics and culture — all the things Simone de Beauvoir left out — creating a more grounded analysis. She had grown up witnessing the stark differences between the place of women in the African, Boer, and British cultures around her. In some ways, she was a more accomplished social theorist than novelist. Her small treatise, Woman and Labour was more sophisticated, especially in escaping from the trap of thinking your own milieu somehow reflects “nature.”

I was in the process of recovering from reading too much social science theory (and the passive-voice writing that goes with it) for my cultural Anthropology degree, and here was a marvelous cross-cultural analyses of colonialism, cultural subjugation, and women’s identity defined by her role in the economy (hence her coinage of the term “sex parasitism”). She pointed out that the African women around her were more valued and contributed to the economic well-being of their households in ways English women were unable to do. Hobsbawm and the Marx circle took up her work and popularized it. Havelock Ellis popularized her ideas about women and his own theories about female sexuality (hot stuff at the time!). The suffragettes read her stories and essays to bolster their spirits in between forced feedings in Holloway prison during their hunger strikes.

But I digress.

Recently I read a wonderful “alternate history” set during WWI, Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers. About half way through the story, the main character mentions The Story of an African Farm, remarking that all her female colleagues seem to have a copy. She’s trying to decide if it had been used as a code book to encrypt messages. Kowal did solid research on the role of women in fighting the war, and amplified it with her “ghost talkers” in a way that felt true to the period, if somewhat macabre. I enjoyed it, but I was even more delighted to see Olive referred to as a popular writer. She was!

Happy Birthday, Olive.

International Women’s Day and Jane Addams

Yes, I’m a day late, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about this for several days and wanted to get it right.

Jane Addams is one of those amazing women who were famous and revered in their day, and then somehow disappeared from sight, in spite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, her contributions and influence swept away by changing fashion, and dare I say it, because her social ideals are labeled too “feminine.” Ideals like feeding starving children, providing healthcare and education for immigrants, and keeping us out of World War I (for which there was a great deal of support across the country). Oh yes, and for supporting something as outrageous as the 8 hour working day.

You know, all those girly things.

She was a great hero of mine when I was a child, one of the few women included in my K-12 curriculum. A little hint of 1890s radicalism remained in our curriculum, thanks probably to the influence of Dewey and the Lab School in Chicago, since I grew up near Chicago. When I hear the nonsense spouted about immigration in our country right now, I think of her wise and thoughtful approach to considering the value immigrants bring to their new country, as well as what we owe to them. The same arguments and rhetoric we are hearing now have been used over the last several hundred years with astonishing regularity, from the time California passed a law to expel the Chinese, to deploring the “dirty and degenerate” Irish or Italians or Poles or Greeks in Chicago in the nineteenth-century.

Jane Addams addressed this head on at Hull House, set up to provide assistance to the wretchedly poor and exploited labor pool fueling the wealth of the stockyards, the railroads, and the other companies run by the titans of industry in Chicago.

I read her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House in college and was surprised at her cultural approach to the immigrant communities. The arguments she was making were anthropological arguments for the differences in how the different communities adapted. And her insights about the embarrassment the children of immigrants felt for their parents’ old country ways were very shrewd. Hull House’s Labor Museum of crafts and industries from the ‘old country” helped the younger generation appreciate the skills and knowledge of their parents:

“There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother’s whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities—to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”

Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams

What has this to do with International Women’s Day? Addams was especially active in the International women’s movement, becoming one of the founders of the organization later known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. If you read the historical accounts of the conference they held after Hitler came to power in Germany, it’s chilling to realize that every one of their assertions about the danger of Germany re-arming (with American arms and resources) proved true. If the boycott they urged had happened, if Americans had forgone the profit they were making from Germany, who knows how history might have been different. It’s a complex subject and you can read more about it here.