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selenakYuletide nominations are running until Monday morning. Mine were The Borgias (with characters Lucrezia, Giulia, Vannoza and Rodrigo - I really want a story about Lucrezia and Giulia, but the rest of the clan in supporting roles is welcome as well), 18th Century CE RPF (with characters James Boswell and Mary Bryant because I wish someone would write the story about Boswell's defense of Bryant after her return from Botany Bay, the clash of two utterly different worlds, etc.), and Sharon Penman's novel The Reckoning (with characters Davydd ap Gruffydd, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, Elizabeth de Ferres and Ellen de Montfort - even though this is the Penman novel which inevitably makes me cry and breaks my heart every time I read it, I would love to read more about the fraternal relationship at the core of it). The Borgias as a fandom were accepted, but we'll see about the others.
I was going back and thro as to whether or not to nominate something T.E. Lawrence related, because I've been browsing through his letters again, but I wanted the other subjects more. Still, Lawrence (as in Lawrence of Arabia): one of the great letter writers of the 20th century, both because he was great with descriptions and because his letters have the gift of feeling like immediate speech, with the tone varying depending on the recepient. (With the most revealing and intimate letters probably written to Charlotte Shaw - wife of G.B.S who became Lawrence's confidant post war - and to novelist E.M. Forster.) And the subjects are great, from vivid and astute pen portraits of many of his contemporaries to books and plays to his life long struggle with his sexuality.
Lawrence's parents were a strange example of a popular novelistic pairing in real life and thus with various convoluted twists - the highly principled governess (complete with Jane Eyre like miserable childhood as an orphan in horrid school) and the unhappily married lord of the manor falling in love with her. As opposed to Bertha Mason, Sir Thomas Chapman's wife didn't conveniently die or commit suicide. And Sarah the governess managed to give up neither her religion nor her man. Which left her with a life long guilt complex (and a stint as a missionary after he died - Jane taking up St. River's offer after all?) and the determination to make atonment a family principle. Here's how Lawrence describes her, and his father, to Charlotte Shaw in the 20s:
Mother is rather wonderful: but very exciting. She is so set, so assured in mind. I think she 'set' many years ago; perhaps before I was born. I have a terror of her knowing anything about my feelings, or convictions, or way of life. If she knew they would be damaged, violated, no longer mine. You see, she would not hesitate to understand them: and I do not understand them, and do not want to. Nor has she ever seen any of us growing, because I think she has not grown since we began. She was wholly wrapped up in my father, whom she had carried away jealously from his former life and country, against great odds, and whom she kept as her trophy of power. Also she was a fanatical housewife, who would rather do her own work than not, to the total neglect of herself.
And now two of my brothers are dead, and Arnie (the youngest) and I have left her, and avoid her as our first rule of existence: while my eldest brother is hardly her peer or natural companion. It is a dreadful position for her, and yet I see no alternative. While she remains herself, and I remain myself it must happen. In all her letters she tells me she is old and lonely, and loves only us; and she begs us to love her, back again, and points us to Christ, in whom, she says, is the only happiness and truth. Not that she finds happiness herself. Of course I shouldn't tell you all of this, but she makes Arnie and me profoundly unhappy. (...)We give her pain because we cannot turn on love to her in our letters, like a water-tap; and Christ to us is not a symbol, but a personality spoiled by the accretion of such believers as herself. If you saw her, you whose mind has not grown a shell-case, perhaps you could show her the other sides and things of which she does not dream. If only she would be content to loose hold of us.
My father was on the large scale, tolerant, experienced, grand, rash, humoursome, skilled to speak, and naturally lord-like. He had been 35 years in the larger life, and a spend-thrift, a sportsman, and a hard rider and drinker. My mother, brought up as a child of sin in the Island of Skye by a bible-thinking Presbyterian, then a nurse-maid, then 'guilty' (in her own judgement) of taking my father from his wife. To justify herself she remodelled my father, making him a teetotaller, a domestic man, a careful spender of pence. They had us five children, and never more than 400 pounds a year: and such pride against gain, and such pride in saving, as you cannot imagine. Father had, to keep with mother, to drop all his old life, and all his friends. She by dint of will raised herself to be his companion: social things meant much to him: but they never went calling, or on visits, together. They thought always they were living in hisn, and that we would some day find out. Whereas I knew before I was ten, and they never told me; till after my father's death something I said showed Mother that I knew, and didn't care a straw. One of the real reasons (there are three or four) why I am in the service is so that I may live by myself. She has given me a terror of families and inquisitions. And yet you'll understand she is my mother and an extraordinary person.
More pen portraits. One of Faisal, written to Charlotte Shaw after Mrs. Shaw had met Feisal (Lawrence at the time was in India at the time) when the later visited Britain on a state visit in 1927:
For what affects Feisal, I'm happy, indeed, that you liked him. He is one of the best people I knew. Your remarks about his tenacity interested me. He is both tenaciouis and weak: perhaps these qualities always go together. It is easy to swing him off his point: and when released he tends to swing back to it. Thereafore the French called him treacherous. He (...) is very gentle, you know, and very kind, and very considerate, and outrageously generous to friends, and mild to his enemies, and cleanly and honest and intelligent: and full of wild freakish humour: though I suppose that is a little overlaid by kingliness, now. He has been king for six years, which is a deep experience. I wish you could have known him, as I did, when he was Feisal, just. One of the most attractive human beings I have ever met. What you say about his looking young and happy and peaceful pleases me. Of course he has won great credit for himself: and that brings a man to flower. And in 1919 when John painted him he was up against very terrible conditions in Paris. No man could have looked other than broken with worry. Those five months in Paris were the worst I have lived through: and they were worse for Feisal. However, he learnt the whole art of politics, from them. Perhaps I did, too!
Of Gertrude Bell, when writing a condolence letter to her father apropos the publication of Gertrude Bell's letters after her death. Bell and Lawrence had been friendly rivals before and during the war.
I think she was very happy in her death, for her political work - one of the biggest things a woman has ever had to do - was as finished as mine. That Irak state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit - government - to give a people who have long done without. Of course it is you who are unhappy, not having Gertrude any more; but there - she wasn't yours really, though she did give you so much. Her letters are exactly herself - eager, interested, almost excited, always about her company and the day's events. She kept an everlasting freshness; or at least, however tired she was, she could always get up enough interest to match that of anyone who came to see her. I don't think I ever met anyone more civilised, in the sense of her width of intellectual sympathy. And she was exciting too, for you never knew how far she would leap out in any direction, under the stimulus of some powerful expert who had engaged her mind in his direction. She and I used to have a private laugh over that: - because I kept two of her letters, one describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil, - and I'd show her first one and then another, begging her to be charitable towards her present objects of dislike. However, you won't want to know what I think; her loss must be nearly unbearable, but I'm so grateful to you for giving so much of her personality to the world.
To Charlotte Shaw about meeting Noel Coward in 1930:
On Wednesday I lunched with Philip Sassoon, with whom came Noel Coward. He is not deep but remarkable. A hasty kind of genius. I wonder what his origin is? His prose is quick, balanced, alive: like Congreve, probably, in its day. He dignifies slang when he admits it. I liked him: and suspected that you probably do not. Both of us are right.
About Charlotte's husband, GBS himself, only half kidding:
I have offended. I'm sorry. Things arise from differences in point-of-view. 'Dram-drinking', I said, thinking of the effect on me. A 'whisky bottle' said you, looking at GBS with new eyes. Yet if I had called him stimulating no harm would have been done. I thought of 'drinking', you thought of 'dram'. He is stimulating. He stimulates his household. THat is why Ayot will never be my good toast-and-water.
Lawrence had met the Shaws apropos asking GBS to read through his war memoirs, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and you can make educated guesses about childless couples and the fact one of his later pseudonyms in the air force was "Shaw". ("Lawrence" itself was, as the man observed more than once, an assumed name, by his parents after his father ran away with his mother.) Which meant that when GBS dedicated St. Joan to him, he wrote "From Public Shaw to Private Shaw". It was a discussion of St. Joan via letter with Charlotte that let to Lawrence talking about his experience of being raped during the war in an extraordinary outburst. First the St. Joan observations:
've read Joan, St. Joan and want to say straight out that it is one of his best writings. (...) Some sea-change has come over G.B.S. in the last ten years. Perhaps it isn't new that he should be on the side of the angels - even when they are undisguised angels - but surely it's new that every one of his characters should be honest and kindly and even-minded? I like it, and find it essentially true, the more I see of men (almost I'm able to think gently of some sergeants... they mean less than appears... their official style has to be subtracted before you measure the manner and matter of their delivery). (...) Seriously, it's done his art and heart good to get the doctrine of Methuselah off his breathing-works: and the poet in him is now going to have a little dance. Did you note the balance of prose in the fighting parts of Joan? Take care: he may yet write an epic of blood-lust. All things are possible with a delivered evangelical. (After some more detailed praise he gets in a bit of criticism) I found pp 66-95 intolerable. The shadow of the tragedy at the end lay over the first pages, and made the so accurate historical 'placing' of the men a horror. Over these passages I galloped, to reach the crisis. Joan came in, and held her own, indeed increased her nobility. It was good to make her sign that confession - and then she died, 'off'. I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top-scene for him. I funked it, in the death of Farraj, my man: faced it, in the plain narrative of my mishaps in Deraa the night I was captured. Here in St. Joan the clmax will be red light shining from the fire into the courtyard. AUthors feel they aren't up to writing about so tremendous a thing, and so they put a row of dots, or swallow silently, and leave the poor reader to stuff up their gap with his cherished and grudged emotion. It's indirect art and direct shirking.
This apparantly caused an indignant defense of the play in Charlotte Shaw, in turn let Lawrence to elaborate what he had meant.
The trial scene in Joan. Poor Joan, I was thinking of her as a person, not a moral lesson. The pain meant more to her than the example. You instance my night in Deraa. Well, I'm always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender. It's the individual view. You can't share it. About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days with my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with - our bodily integrity. It's an unforgivable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it's that which has made me forswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptible wits and talents. You may call this morbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying 'Unclean unclean!'
Playwright Terence Rattigan in his drama about Lawrence, Ross, wasn't the only one who speculated that what made the Deraa event so traumatic in addition to the rape was that Lawrence found himself responding sexually to the beatings and this enhanced the sense of guilt and shame. However, years later E.M. Forster, whom he had befriended, gave him one of his explciitly homosexual stories to read (which wasn't printed in Forster's life time, much as Maurice wasn't), Dr. Woolacott. This story had an extraordinary effect on Lawrence:
There is a strange cleansing beauty about the whole piece of writing. So passionate, of course; so indecent, some people might say: but I must confess that it has made me change my point of view. I had not before believed that such a thing could be so presented - and so credited. I suppose you will not print it? Not that it anywhere says too much: but it shows far more than it says: and these things are mysteries. The Turks (...) did it to me, by force: and since then I have gone about whimpering to myself Unclean, unclean. Now I don't know. Perhaps there is another side, your side, to the story. I couldn't ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me: but perhaps to surrender to such a figure as your Death there might be a greater realisation - and thereby a more final destruction - of the body than any loneliness can reach. Meanwhile I am in your debt for an experience of such strength & sweetness and bitterness and hope as seldom comes to anyone. I wish my account of it were not so vaguely inadequate: and I cannot suggest 'more when we meet' for it will be hard to speak of these things without dragging our own conduct and bodies into the argument: and that's too late, in my case.
I was going back and thro as to whether or not to nominate something T.E. Lawrence related, because I've been browsing through his letters again, but I wanted the other subjects more. Still, Lawrence (as in Lawrence of Arabia): one of the great letter writers of the 20th century, both because he was great with descriptions and because his letters have the gift of feeling like immediate speech, with the tone varying depending on the recepient. (With the most revealing and intimate letters probably written to Charlotte Shaw - wife of G.B.S who became Lawrence's confidant post war - and to novelist E.M. Forster.) And the subjects are great, from vivid and astute pen portraits of many of his contemporaries to books and plays to his life long struggle with his sexuality.
Lawrence's parents were a strange example of a popular novelistic pairing in real life and thus with various convoluted twists - the highly principled governess (complete with Jane Eyre like miserable childhood as an orphan in horrid school) and the unhappily married lord of the manor falling in love with her. As opposed to Bertha Mason, Sir Thomas Chapman's wife didn't conveniently die or commit suicide. And Sarah the governess managed to give up neither her religion nor her man. Which left her with a life long guilt complex (and a stint as a missionary after he died - Jane taking up St. River's offer after all?) and the determination to make atonment a family principle. Here's how Lawrence describes her, and his father, to Charlotte Shaw in the 20s:
Mother is rather wonderful: but very exciting. She is so set, so assured in mind. I think she 'set' many years ago; perhaps before I was born. I have a terror of her knowing anything about my feelings, or convictions, or way of life. If she knew they would be damaged, violated, no longer mine. You see, she would not hesitate to understand them: and I do not understand them, and do not want to. Nor has she ever seen any of us growing, because I think she has not grown since we began. She was wholly wrapped up in my father, whom she had carried away jealously from his former life and country, against great odds, and whom she kept as her trophy of power. Also she was a fanatical housewife, who would rather do her own work than not, to the total neglect of herself.
And now two of my brothers are dead, and Arnie (the youngest) and I have left her, and avoid her as our first rule of existence: while my eldest brother is hardly her peer or natural companion. It is a dreadful position for her, and yet I see no alternative. While she remains herself, and I remain myself it must happen. In all her letters she tells me she is old and lonely, and loves only us; and she begs us to love her, back again, and points us to Christ, in whom, she says, is the only happiness and truth. Not that she finds happiness herself. Of course I shouldn't tell you all of this, but she makes Arnie and me profoundly unhappy. (...)We give her pain because we cannot turn on love to her in our letters, like a water-tap; and Christ to us is not a symbol, but a personality spoiled by the accretion of such believers as herself. If you saw her, you whose mind has not grown a shell-case, perhaps you could show her the other sides and things of which she does not dream. If only she would be content to loose hold of us.
My father was on the large scale, tolerant, experienced, grand, rash, humoursome, skilled to speak, and naturally lord-like. He had been 35 years in the larger life, and a spend-thrift, a sportsman, and a hard rider and drinker. My mother, brought up as a child of sin in the Island of Skye by a bible-thinking Presbyterian, then a nurse-maid, then 'guilty' (in her own judgement) of taking my father from his wife. To justify herself she remodelled my father, making him a teetotaller, a domestic man, a careful spender of pence. They had us five children, and never more than 400 pounds a year: and such pride against gain, and such pride in saving, as you cannot imagine. Father had, to keep with mother, to drop all his old life, and all his friends. She by dint of will raised herself to be his companion: social things meant much to him: but they never went calling, or on visits, together. They thought always they were living in hisn, and that we would some day find out. Whereas I knew before I was ten, and they never told me; till after my father's death something I said showed Mother that I knew, and didn't care a straw. One of the real reasons (there are three or four) why I am in the service is so that I may live by myself. She has given me a terror of families and inquisitions. And yet you'll understand she is my mother and an extraordinary person.
More pen portraits. One of Faisal, written to Charlotte Shaw after Mrs. Shaw had met Feisal (Lawrence at the time was in India at the time) when the later visited Britain on a state visit in 1927:
For what affects Feisal, I'm happy, indeed, that you liked him. He is one of the best people I knew. Your remarks about his tenacity interested me. He is both tenaciouis and weak: perhaps these qualities always go together. It is easy to swing him off his point: and when released he tends to swing back to it. Thereafore the French called him treacherous. He (...) is very gentle, you know, and very kind, and very considerate, and outrageously generous to friends, and mild to his enemies, and cleanly and honest and intelligent: and full of wild freakish humour: though I suppose that is a little overlaid by kingliness, now. He has been king for six years, which is a deep experience. I wish you could have known him, as I did, when he was Feisal, just. One of the most attractive human beings I have ever met. What you say about his looking young and happy and peaceful pleases me. Of course he has won great credit for himself: and that brings a man to flower. And in 1919 when John painted him he was up against very terrible conditions in Paris. No man could have looked other than broken with worry. Those five months in Paris were the worst I have lived through: and they were worse for Feisal. However, he learnt the whole art of politics, from them. Perhaps I did, too!
Of Gertrude Bell, when writing a condolence letter to her father apropos the publication of Gertrude Bell's letters after her death. Bell and Lawrence had been friendly rivals before and during the war.
I think she was very happy in her death, for her political work - one of the biggest things a woman has ever had to do - was as finished as mine. That Irak state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit - government - to give a people who have long done without. Of course it is you who are unhappy, not having Gertrude any more; but there - she wasn't yours really, though she did give you so much. Her letters are exactly herself - eager, interested, almost excited, always about her company and the day's events. She kept an everlasting freshness; or at least, however tired she was, she could always get up enough interest to match that of anyone who came to see her. I don't think I ever met anyone more civilised, in the sense of her width of intellectual sympathy. And she was exciting too, for you never knew how far she would leap out in any direction, under the stimulus of some powerful expert who had engaged her mind in his direction. She and I used to have a private laugh over that: - because I kept two of her letters, one describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil, - and I'd show her first one and then another, begging her to be charitable towards her present objects of dislike. However, you won't want to know what I think; her loss must be nearly unbearable, but I'm so grateful to you for giving so much of her personality to the world.
To Charlotte Shaw about meeting Noel Coward in 1930:
On Wednesday I lunched with Philip Sassoon, with whom came Noel Coward. He is not deep but remarkable. A hasty kind of genius. I wonder what his origin is? His prose is quick, balanced, alive: like Congreve, probably, in its day. He dignifies slang when he admits it. I liked him: and suspected that you probably do not. Both of us are right.
About Charlotte's husband, GBS himself, only half kidding:
I have offended. I'm sorry. Things arise from differences in point-of-view. 'Dram-drinking', I said, thinking of the effect on me. A 'whisky bottle' said you, looking at GBS with new eyes. Yet if I had called him stimulating no harm would have been done. I thought of 'drinking', you thought of 'dram'. He is stimulating. He stimulates his household. THat is why Ayot will never be my good toast-and-water.
Lawrence had met the Shaws apropos asking GBS to read through his war memoirs, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and you can make educated guesses about childless couples and the fact one of his later pseudonyms in the air force was "Shaw". ("Lawrence" itself was, as the man observed more than once, an assumed name, by his parents after his father ran away with his mother.) Which meant that when GBS dedicated St. Joan to him, he wrote "From Public Shaw to Private Shaw". It was a discussion of St. Joan via letter with Charlotte that let to Lawrence talking about his experience of being raped during the war in an extraordinary outburst. First the St. Joan observations:
've read Joan, St. Joan and want to say straight out that it is one of his best writings. (...) Some sea-change has come over G.B.S. in the last ten years. Perhaps it isn't new that he should be on the side of the angels - even when they are undisguised angels - but surely it's new that every one of his characters should be honest and kindly and even-minded? I like it, and find it essentially true, the more I see of men (almost I'm able to think gently of some sergeants... they mean less than appears... their official style has to be subtracted before you measure the manner and matter of their delivery). (...) Seriously, it's done his art and heart good to get the doctrine of Methuselah off his breathing-works: and the poet in him is now going to have a little dance. Did you note the balance of prose in the fighting parts of Joan? Take care: he may yet write an epic of blood-lust. All things are possible with a delivered evangelical. (After some more detailed praise he gets in a bit of criticism) I found pp 66-95 intolerable. The shadow of the tragedy at the end lay over the first pages, and made the so accurate historical 'placing' of the men a horror. Over these passages I galloped, to reach the crisis. Joan came in, and held her own, indeed increased her nobility. It was good to make her sign that confession - and then she died, 'off'. I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top-scene for him. I funked it, in the death of Farraj, my man: faced it, in the plain narrative of my mishaps in Deraa the night I was captured. Here in St. Joan the clmax will be red light shining from the fire into the courtyard. AUthors feel they aren't up to writing about so tremendous a thing, and so they put a row of dots, or swallow silently, and leave the poor reader to stuff up their gap with his cherished and grudged emotion. It's indirect art and direct shirking.
This apparantly caused an indignant defense of the play in Charlotte Shaw, in turn let Lawrence to elaborate what he had meant.
The trial scene in Joan. Poor Joan, I was thinking of her as a person, not a moral lesson. The pain meant more to her than the example. You instance my night in Deraa. Well, I'm always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender. It's the individual view. You can't share it. About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days with my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with - our bodily integrity. It's an unforgivable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it's that which has made me forswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptible wits and talents. You may call this morbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying 'Unclean unclean!'
Playwright Terence Rattigan in his drama about Lawrence, Ross, wasn't the only one who speculated that what made the Deraa event so traumatic in addition to the rape was that Lawrence found himself responding sexually to the beatings and this enhanced the sense of guilt and shame. However, years later E.M. Forster, whom he had befriended, gave him one of his explciitly homosexual stories to read (which wasn't printed in Forster's life time, much as Maurice wasn't), Dr. Woolacott. This story had an extraordinary effect on Lawrence:
There is a strange cleansing beauty about the whole piece of writing. So passionate, of course; so indecent, some people might say: but I must confess that it has made me change my point of view. I had not before believed that such a thing could be so presented - and so credited. I suppose you will not print it? Not that it anywhere says too much: but it shows far more than it says: and these things are mysteries. The Turks (...) did it to me, by force: and since then I have gone about whimpering to myself Unclean, unclean. Now I don't know. Perhaps there is another side, your side, to the story. I couldn't ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me: but perhaps to surrender to such a figure as your Death there might be a greater realisation - and thereby a more final destruction - of the body than any loneliness can reach. Meanwhile I am in your debt for an experience of such strength & sweetness and bitterness and hope as seldom comes to anyone. I wish my account of it were not so vaguely inadequate: and I cannot suggest 'more when we meet' for it will be hard to speak of these things without dragging our own conduct and bodies into the argument: and that's too late, in my case.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 01:33 pm (UTC)And also to meet him, but that ship has sailed. :(
But yeah, wow.
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Date: 2011-11-14 04:49 pm (UTC)Book-wise, there is Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the magnum opus about the Arab revolt, of course, but imo his second book, The Mint (which was published under a pseudonym but these days of course is available under Lawrence at Penguin), is better as a start - less self conscious (and also much shorter). Also still in print: his translation of the Odyssey, which reads beautifully.
Film-wise, there is Lawrence of Arabia, which is one of my all time favourites independent from the subject because it's David Lean's awesome direction at its peak, and everyone who didn't get an Oscar for it (like young Peter O'Toole) was robbed, and the lesser known tv movie A Dangerous Man: Lawrence after Arabia (young Ralph Fiennes as T.E. Lawrence and pre-DS9 Siddig el Fadil aka Alexander Siddig as Feisal; takes place during the Paris peace conference). Here's a link to the start of the later. The opening monologue is from Seven Pillars, btw.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 11:55 pm (UTC)