During my historical podcast hopings, I came across one that in its Q & A sessions suggested his dream cast for a multi season lengthy HBO style series on the French Revolution: Timothee Chalamet as St Just, a younger Tom Hanks or Bradley Cooper type as Louis XVI ("someone who can be both sympathetic and frustrating at the same time"), Anthony Hopkins as Mirabeau, Christan Bale as Marat, Henry Cavill as Lafayette and Adam Driver as Camille Desmoulins, with Margot Robbie as Marie Antoinette. The podcaster had no idea whom to cast as Robespierre which frustrated him. Now, I can see all of these (though Hopkins is too old for Mirabeau by now, and for that matter everyone other than Chalamet is pushing it, age wise - Louis and Marie Antoinette were both in their mid to later 30s when they were executed). and the key prominent revolutionaries other than Marat and Mirabeau were in their early 30s when they died as well. I think it's in Mantel's Place of Greater Safety that someone observes that many of the lead revolutionaries being nearly all relatively young (lawyers, most of them) when rising to power, with no practical experience in death, has a lot to do with how the Terror came to be.

(BTW, there's now a trailer for a new movie about Napoleon by Ridley Scott, starring Joaquin Phoenix as N. Bonaparte. On the one hand, can totally see the casting, and also, the two worked well together before in Gladiator. Otoh, Joaquin Phoenix while right for Emperor Napoleon in his downfall years is too old now for young Bonaparte on the rise in the final years of the Revolution, and the age does matter in how he came across to his contemporaries.)

Anyway, back to the podcaster's dream casting for a multi season Game of Revolution: I think Bale as Marat would be a great choice, and Chalamet having a go as Antoine "Angel of Death" Saint-Juste should be worth seeing, but I'm going back and thro on Driver as Desmoulins. I mean, acting wise, sure, but he's a bit too athletic? Then again, many actors hit the gym regularly for professional reasons, resulting in a body shape an 18th century guy who isn't a soldier would not have had. And of course Margot Robbie could both the frivolity and the strength in adversity. But I do think that a multi season series on the French Revolution should go with younger actors in all the main parts, letting them age along with the seasons, and reserve the established stars for cameos (i.e. parts for people who are only around briefly), thus preserving the poignancy - and making it more difficult for people not already familiar with the French Revolution to know who's going to be prominent, who is doomed and who'll make it out alive despite the odds. Also, of course: Olympe de Gouges and the female revolutionaries should get actual appearances and roles beyond "briefly mentioned" (if mentioned at all). I would say "also General Alex Dumas", but that depends on where you do the cut off point - the two most common ones are eitherh Thermidor because of the death of Robespierre and the end of the Terror (though by no means the end of purges and bloody weeks - they just came from non-left corners thereafter), or some years later Brumaire (Napeolon goes from General to First Consul Bonaparte). If the former, then there's not enough narrative space, if the later, absolutely.

Because of how important rumors and paranoia and the urgent belief in conspiracies were to people of all ideological persuasions, it could be a very timely series in many respects, but I bet there would also be a lot of fannish fury once the cast starts to get killed off at an increasing pace. And I can just hear the complaint about former fan favourites like Lafayette suddenly holding the idiot ball to get the plot where it's meant to be, and/or acting ooc (Champs du Mars massacre, cough).

On an unrelated note, here's a good article about Victorian writer Wilkie Collins. From which I learned that when Wilkie was in a health crisis, his bff Dickens offered to finish No-Name for him so Wilkie could make the deadline. (Collins declined.) Dickens swore he could do it in a way so readers wouldn't notice a difference. Honestly, I doubt it. Dickens was in many respects the superior writer, but not when it came to female characters. Especially those between 20 and 40. I don't think the main one from No Name would have made it out of her novel in a relatively happy ending if written by Dickens, or at least not without emigrating to Aiustralia. And I can't see Lydia Gwilt (from Armadale) writing her snarky diary entries in a Dickens novel. At all.

A first crop of Yuletide stories I loved:

Historical Fiction:

And flies with Swallow's Wings: Scenes from a London cookshop. This is a great take on one of the more intriguing anecdotes re: Anne Neville and Richard III, and to say more would spoil the story.

Periapsides: Five things Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn could have been to each other.

An action for reclaiming an inheritance: in which Terentia hires a lawyer, young Cicero, to represent her in a lawsuit, and I absolutely adore this take on her - and everyone else who shows up in this tale set in the last years of Sulla's reign.

Andor:

All Blue and Gold and Glittering:
In search of a present for Mon Mothma, Tay Kolma pays a visit to an antiques shop he’s been told she’s fond of.

There is a World beyond this Place: Twelve things Cassian Andor misses most in prison.

The Body/Stand By Me:

Summer in the City In the summer of 1964, Chris gets Gordie to come with him on a different kind of adventure.

A Christmas Carol:

The Price of Salvation: The fate of his old partner who after all saved Scrooge is not something Scrooge just accepts. Especially since the ghost of Jacob Marley keeps coming back...


The Expanse:

A Fresh Start: in which Drummer and Avasarala learn to deal with each other.

Ten Lullabies: great ensemble portrait through the theme of lullabies.

Everyone else seems to reply to this question with the Muppets version. Now, I like the Muppets version and admire its cleverness, but my favourite Christmas Carol adaption is actually not any of the film versions, but the audio recording of Patrick Stewart's stage performance. Not, I emphasize, the made for tv 1999 adaption where Stewart plays Scrooge; no, I mean the stage solo version he did for the RSC in 1993, and for which he won an Olivier. Alas I did not have the chance to see it on stage, but a kind soul gave me the tape - this was when tapes were still a thing - and I loved it. The key difference here is that Patrick Stewart doesn't just play Scrooge, he recites Dickens' prose - a very different thing - and the way he brings those lines to life, the versatility of it, is nothing short of amazing. To quote from this review : You notice at once that there aren’t many actors left like Stewart these days, actors who can speak with such exemplary power and clarity. When he declares: “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner”, every word, every syllable, is made to count. He relishes all the glorious energy, flavour and humour of Dickens’s prose, and Scrooge suddenly seems to stand before us in all his grotesque glory. (...) In the course of the show, Stewart plays some 40 characters, ranging from the falsetto innocence of Tiny Tim to the disgusting squalor of Old Joe, the greasy rag-and-bone man in his filthy lair. Has the ghost of Marley ever seemed more pitifully sad, the joy of the Cratchits’ Christmas celebrations more touchingly merry? I beg leave to doubt it.

Stewart also proves a virtuoso when it comes to pace and mood. There are rapt passages here when the whole audience seems to be holding its breath as Stewart lays bare the darkness of Scrooge’s soul and the terrible urgency of turning it to the light. But then he will suddenly relax into humour and vitality, picking up the narrative thread, barreling through the action and imitating the chimes of the bells (“Ga-doing, Ga-doing”) with almost childlike enthusiasm.

And that's why even the mere audio recording is my favourite adaption of A Christmas Carol.

The other days

In the middle of the few-days-before-Christmas business, I discovered that for the first time in many a year, I will get a Yuletide Treat, and also, I'm pretty sure re: the fandom, so imagine yours truly running around with a wide smile of delight today. I can't wait! (For the official assignment gift as well, of course, but the treat was such an unexepcted bonus this year.)

Speaking of fanfiction look forward to, startrekholidays will open soon, I think, and then I'm pouncing here.

Armando Iannucci, who directed the latest screen version, on why we should (re)read David Copperfield. I'm with him there. The bit about Uriah Heep is especially interesting.

Trailer spotted: The Man Who Invented Christmas seems to be trying to take the Shakespeare in Love approach to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol. The following thoughts occured to me in no particular order:

- Dan Stevens is actually made to look like a young Charles Dickens and has something of that manic energy, but:

- as Dickens' favourite daughter Kate Perugini put it, writing to George Bernard Shaw: "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a jolly, jocose gentleman walking about the earth with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch you would greatly oblige me."

- no such luck, Kate, not with this movie. Though Dickens really wasn't

- I know I complain about Mark Gatiss written episodes of Doctor Who a lot, but his very first one, The Unquiet Dead, actually did something more interesting with the basic idea of Dickens + Christmas Carol + supernatural elements than this trailer indicates

- why is it that "based on a true story" movies that tackle author plus famous work always feel the need to pretend the author in question had writers block and/or dire difficulties before hitting on the inspiration for the famous work? Do we blame Stoppard for this one, too? Finding Neverland did it as well, and it's just as untrue here (neither Barrie nor Dickens were when writing Peter Pan and Christmas Carol respectively in any type of financial or inspirational difficulties)

- the idea of Charles Dickens, of all the people, having writers' block is hilarious, though, because his problem was more the opposite. Neil Gaiman in the Sandman story Calliope lets Dream curse a writer with literally unending inspiration (spoiler: it's not a boon when you write your fingers bloody because you really can't stop), and Dickens wasn't quite there, but nearly.

Mind you, the film makers are probably safe to assume most tv watchers know zilch about Dickens' biography. But not for the first time, I wonder whether a miniseries wouldn't be a great format to tackle that, Dickens in his morally ambiguous complexity, covering the whole life from child-of-a-conman Charles to celebrated writer, philantropist and terrible husband Dickens going on one last reciting tour. Abi Morgan did a good job with The Invisible Woman, taking one particular part of his life, and she has tv experience, so she'd be my first choice to write such a series.

Meanwhile, in another fandom, to wit, Star Wars:

Balance Point: now by now there are some stories in which Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi haunts Vader, but this story is the first one which lets someone else who used to be close to Anakin Skywalker do so instead, and executes that premise beautifully.( Spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels ensue. )

Some of the loot from my recent London trip:

Effie Gray, which I mostly wanted to watch because Emma Thompson wrote the script. She also plays a supporting role, but given her script for Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility was superb, I was looking forward to this other effort in the writing department. It's a cinematic take on a notoriously bad Victorian marriage, that between our title character, played by Dakota Fanning and John Ruskin, played by Emma Thompsons rl significant other, Greg Wise, in a far cry from his Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Between ridiculed as a a pretentious fob in Mr. Turner and depicted as an occasionally pitiable and otherwise tyrannical creep here, Ruskin had a bad cinematic 2014, all the since what he was actually famous and beloved for - and the Ruskin-influenced people included artists as diverse as Tolstoy, Wilde and Shaw - is hard to get across in a movie that's not really about him: philosophy and art criticism are hard to dramatize, which means that when Ruskin's suffocatingly overprotective parents keep harping on his genius, an audience not versed in Victoriana is bound to wonder "genius in what?"

No matter. Effie, who, me being a German, inevitably reminded me of fictional Effie Briest, the heroine of Fontane's novel of the same name, marries Ruskin at age 16, has one of the weirdest documented wedding nights when the sight of her naked body ends any attempt at sexual relations before they really start (biographers' speculation as to what exactly put Ruskin off go from the sight of Effie's pubic hair - on the assumption that Ruskin's only familiarity with the female body before this event would have been via paintings, which tend to avoid said hair -, to speculating she was menunstruating to suspecting body odour, finds herself as an ornament in the Ruskin household without anything to do or any companionship to engage in, starts to develop depression and physical ailments and finally, after falling for painter John Millais, gets some legal advice and sues for divorce based on non-consummation and impotence (which is why we know about the wedding night), which is granted, to the scandal of the age. Thompson in her script puts the emphasis on Effie's disintegrating marriage to Ruskin and final escape, not on the romance with Millais (down to the ending, which isn't Effie rushing in Millais' arms but Effie in her getaway chaise at liberty at last -, and on the suffocating, life less atmosphere in the Ruskin household. All of which is depicted sensitively, but also at length, and hard to bear before Effie finally has had enough, good as the actors are. Reminds me of Henry James' novel Portrait of a Lady in that way. Not one that I'll rewatch.

Dickensian: a witty Dickens/Dickens crossover show in 20 episodes, each episode only half an hour long. Basically glorious Dickens prequel fanfiction, with characters from various of his novels resettled to live all in roughly the same London area and crossing paths. This sometimes works perfectly and sometimes feels very forced, as such a premise is wont to do. The actors are clearly having a ball. The main plot threads holding the whole thing together: the "Who killed Jakob Marley?" murder mystery, with Inspector Bucket on the case, Miss Havisham (here given the first name of Amelia) taking on her father's heritage and being schemed against by her brother Arthur and dastardly future Great Expectations villain Compeyson, and the Barbary sisters, Frances and Honoria, whose tortured relationship with each other makes for one of the most compelling subplots. I thought Frances looked familiar in the pilot but not until the credits rolled on did I realise that she was played by Lucy Saxon herself, Alexandra Moen. Then there's the subplot involving Fagin, Nancy and Bill Sikes, which works, and the comic relief one of the Bumbles, which really doesn't (their scenes are easily the most obvious filler element of the show, but then, Dickens wrote lots of filler scenes due to the monthly installment format), not to mention cameo appearances from other worthies.

Like I said, there's some filler stuff, but I marathoned it these last days because it never ceased to hold my interest, and it certainly makes me want to check out Bleak House, the novel Honoria and Frances are from, which is a Dickens novel I haven't read yet. Plus I salute headwriter Tony Jordan and the actors for coming up with a take on Fagin which solves the eternal dilemma that otoh the Dickens original, an unambiguous villain, is hard to render because of the various antisemetic tropes used, but otoh the Oliver! musical version of Fagin as a lovable rogue is white washing and prettifying all the exploitation of children that Dickens was in a genuine rage about and misses the point of the character. Dickensian's Fagin is a hardcore villain and truly exploitative, but he does have some non-exploitative emotions, and is also clever and not be messed with. And the scene where he and pre-Reformation Scrooge encounter each other is a true delight.

Sadly, the weather, as of easing me in to my departure, remained on the cold and cloudy side, so I paid the Dickens museum a visit, where, as with the Tower, I hadn't been since I was 21. It is as a I dimly remembered a really well reconstructed Victorian house, and the three things which struck me most this time were:

- Dickens's reading desk with a manuscript for his vaunted public readings, full of crossed out print and handwritten sentences over it
- the serpent ring which Kate Dickens gave to her sister, Georgiana Hogarth, as a very pointed present (Georgiana stayed with Dickens and sided with him in the infamous separation after he kicked his wife out) - it is so large a ring that Georgiana must have had thick fingers, btw
- the bust of Dickens' eternally broke father John and on the opposite side of the room a drawing of Wilkins Micawber from David Copperfield ; the fictional Micawber looks so remarkably like John Dickens (who was his real life model), that I suspect either the artist who made the illustrations knew Dickens's father (possible), or conversely the artist who made the bust knew the illustration (even more likely)

With the occasional drop of wetness in either watery or snowy form from the sky I decided to indulge myself and round my time in London off with what was basically a Beatles tribute band going through their entire career, the show Let it Be. Not a musical, as there was no plot or pretense at dialogue, aside from the occasional quip, but the songs themselves and the musicians in costume as appropriate to whichever period the songs hailed from. (Though they stopped short of fake beards of depression for the final year.) It was great fun, though it was a bit distracting that the Paul player was not left handed! Other than that, though, they had the body language for each Beatle down, and the voices were pretty good. The sheer range of songs, the development within a few measly years, reminded me all over again why the Beatles are my favourites. Since it was a matinee performance but still completely filled, I was in company in that regard.:) Most bewildering moment: first the George, while their Paul is moving from bass to piano, says the next song was never written to be played with an orchestra arrangment (boo, hiss, Phil Spector!), but to be heard like this, cue "Paul" playing piano and singing The Long and Winding Road... and then, after the first two verses, up pops the cursed Spector arrangment on playback in the background. I swear, it's a conspiracy.

But anyway: it was a good way to say goodbye, and I'm heading towards the airport now, with a much heavier suitcase full of books and dvds I did not arrive with. Oh, to be in England, now that April is there.:)

Barring special subject cases like serial killers and/or genocidal dictators, biographies tend to err on one of two extremes: either they're hagiographies, blending out much if not all that's disagreeable about the subject, or they're bashfests magnifying the flaws to the nth degree and hardly bothering with anything not contemptible the person in question might have done. Of course, the platonic ideal of biographies is basically one which on the one hand is empathic and makes it clear in non-abstract terms why the reader should care about this person but on the other doesn't shy away from depicting the flaws in a non-prettifying manne. If you feel up to the task, I congratulate you: I'm not sure I could in a non-fictional manner. Not least because there's the additional trouble of actual lives rarely following a good narrative arc with a clear climax and a convenient ending, and the narrative pretense of objectivity (whereas novels never claim to be objective to begin with; they're fiction).

All the same, every now and then you come across a biography that comes very close to or even fulfills said ideal. The latest one I have read is Claire Tomalin's take on Charles Dickens, and since she gets into the ring there with some classics of the biographical genre, not to mention with the fact her subject was someone famous for his memorable characters and superb atmospheric descriptions, this is an even more remarkable feat. Speaking of Dickens' work, one of the Victorian cross connections Claire Tomalin makes which had never occured to me before is that Jane Eyre was published two years before David Copperfield, and that while we have no written down comment from Dickens on the former, he very likely read it (his best friend John Forster did, who suggested to write David Copperfield as a first person narrative like Jane Eyre, something Dickens had never done before; and of course his friend and biggest rival, Thackeray, who praised it to the skies). The childhood chapters of both Jane Eyre and David Copperfield are among the most remarkable in 19th century literature, managing to put the reader firmly in the pov of a child, sharing the outrage of said child when confronted with adult injustice, the vivid imagination taking flight from small details. For her part, Charlotte Bronte read David Copperfield and though she wasn't a Dickens fan per se (she prefered Thackeray and had some justifiable criticism of Dickens' female love interests), she did love David Copperfield and was delighted when her publisher suggested to her that there were similarities between it and her own earlier novel. (You could also add that both Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, like many later authors of children's books, actually did not get along particularly well with children as adults - they drew on their own childhood memories to create the intense child's povs in their novels.)

But what makes Tomalin's biography really outstanding is that she pulls off the next to impossible: selling the reader on Dickens' non-literary good qualities - most prominently his passionate, life long outrage at social injustice and fight against it, not "just" by writing about it but by campaigning, creating alternatives (his most remarkable achievement there lay in persuading the millionairess Angela Coutts to create a home for prostitutes and to remain involved with the organization and supervision), and always being open for individual cases as well - while also describing, in full, his dark side, most prominently his marriage and separation from his wife, which was a Victorian patriarchal nightmare, but also his, to put it mildly, uneven track record when it came to his children. In many ways he was like the cliché of a social worker, fighting tirelessly for strangers but being incapable of dealing fairly with his family. And yet both the Dickens are real: the one who by chance ends up in the jury of a case where a maid, herself born in the workhouse, gave birth on the stairs of the home where she was serving between letting visitors in and having to serve at dinner and who was accused of having killed her baby. (Her defense was that the baby had been born dead.) This was presented to the jurors as a typical case of female immorality, and one of the jurors called for the utmost rigour of the law. Dickens managed to talk the rest of the jury around to a "found dead" verdict re: the baby, got the young maid a good barrister, sent her some food to prison and persuaded a previous employer of the girl's to promise to take her in again after the trial. This was Dickens at his best: "determined in argument, generous in giving help, following through the case, motivated purely by his profound sense that it was wrong that she should be victimized further", as Claire Tomalin puts it.

On the other hand, you have Dickens at his worst: the Dickens who, when he falls in love with a young actress and reaches the breaking point of his marriage, isn't content to simply leave his wife (or rather, make her leave - he was the one who kept the house and family), no, after twenty two years of marriage, eleven children and two miscarriages, he has to punish her for existing, declaring her a bad mother who only fakes her affection for her children (because that was the only reason he could think of to give to the public for the separation), making the children choose, attacking her in the press and not even writing her as much as a condolence letter when one of their children dies. The Dickens of whom his favourite daughter, who had an intense love/hate relationship with him, said: "My poor mother was afraid of my father. She was never allowed to express an opinion - never allowed to say what she felt. (...) We were all very wicked not to take her part. Harry does not take this view, but he was only a boy at the time, and does not realize the grief it was to our mother, after having all her children, to go away and leave us. My mother never rebuked me. I never saw her in a temper. We like to think of our great geniuses as great characters - but we can't. (...) My father was like a madman when my mother left home, this affair brought out all that was worst - all that was weakest in him. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home."

Both sides of Dickens are real, and Claire Tomalin somehow manages never to lose sight of either, and not to use one to negate the other. She also manages to make the whole marriage up to the point of the situation feel like the type of disaster which is brought about by both the characters of the participants and the society they live in. Catherine never was very clever, but she lived in a world where feminity was more often than not defined as being pretty and ornamental. She often suffered from post natal depression and grew stout, but with eleven full term pregnancies, two stillbirths and an increasingly estranged husband who on the one hand made it clear he didn't want more than three children but on the other despite having medical friends and a curious mind never seems to have tried methods of contraception while continuing to see her as his only morally acceptable way to have sex, it's hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Not so coincidentally, the high point of the Dickens marriage, the one time where all of Dickens references to Catherine in his letters are unambigously affectionate and approving without even hidden sarcasm, was the time of his first journey to America, the only time in their twenty two years of married life together when she wasn't pregnant or just post birth, their children and his friends were absent back in England, and they could share something other than sex (indeed Tomalin speculates the reason why Catherine wasn't pregnant during all those months in the US as opposed to all the other time of their marriage might have been that Dickens decided they shouldn't risk even the possibility), discover America together and be companions rather than the husband and wife they were at home.

Given that Claire Tomalin has written a biography of Ellen Ternan (Dickens' later day mistress who was the trigger but not the cause for the separation) before, it's surprising but perhaps inevitable (so many letters destroyed!) Ellen "Nelly" Ternan remains the most shadowy women in the story, with virtually everyone else from Dickens' mother to his first love Maria Beadnell to the unfortunate Catherine to her two sisters who had their own peculiar relationships with Dickens to Katey, Dickens' daughter coming across much more vividly. Claire Tomalin is also good with the social and literary context, with unearthing some against-cliché details as Dickens' love and respect for for French literature, France and many of the French (his youngest son even said he liked them better than the English), which given Dickens is usually cast as of all the Victorian novelists the most English of the English is fairly amusing. (Also, he didn't have much time for the monarchy and had to be persuaded to go when Queen Victoria eventually wanted to meet him. He used the opportunity to cut loose about the evils of the English class system, which seems to have impressed her enough to mention it repeatedly afterwards in her diaries.) When the real life characters have obvious counterparts in Dickens' novels, she's good with both the parallels and differences, notably with Dickens' parents, whom he split up in the lovable Micawbers (who have their mannerisms and eternal in-debt-ness but who are in now way to blame for David Copperfield having to work, and thus are unambigously loved by him) and the hateful Murdstones (putting David to work, which Dickens' real life parents did when he was ten, near eleven, and he never forgot or forgave that while struggling with the fact a benevolent family novelist shouldn't remain angry at his parents). Mr. Micawber can finally turn over a new leaf and emigrate to Australia; John Dickens remains in England, continues to slide from financial disaster to financial disaster, no matter how much his now famous son supports him, and eventually even forges Charles' signature on cheques so Dickens has to put an add in the papers saying he won't stand for cheques written by his father. Ouch. Given his deeply ambigous feelings about his parents, it's probably logical Dickens had a shaky hold on fatherhood. As mentioned before, he hadn't wanted more than three children, and preferably no sons (he wanted daughters and got both sons and daughters). Eleven children arrived, only one of whom died as a toddler, and the connection between that (the survival, not the death) and all the fictional children being killed off to great effect in Dickens' novels was drawn by biographers far earlier than Tomalin. As long as they were small, he did play with them and show interest, but later the younger boys were sent off to a boarding school in Boulogne and remained there despite all of them disliking the school immensely, which makes Dickens' public accusation of Catherine as the parent unable to care for her children even more infuriating than it already was. Of the older children, he quarelled violently with his namesake Charley because Charley was the only one of the Dickens children to openly defy their father and choosing to live with his mother when they separated, and both resented and blamed himself for the marriage Katey made, because he thought (correctly) she married mostly to get away from home, not because she was in love with the man in question (his friend Wilkie Collins' brother). (Cue deeply Freudian scene where Dickens younger daughter Mamie finds him weeping into Katey's marriage dress the morning after she left for her honeymoon.) Katey's memorable outburst about her father decades after his death comes at the end of Claire Tomalin's biography and thus ends it as it begain, in complete shades of grey:

"I know things about my father's character that no one else ever knew; he was not a good man, but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful! (...) I loved my father better than any man in the world - in a different way of course - I loved him for his faults. My father was a wicked man - a very wicked man."

Yesterday was mostly spent helping with the laundry and starting the daunting package of mail around after three weeks of travelling, but I did manage to squeeze some of the tv I missed in, to wit, one Doctor Who episode. I still don't dare reading my flist for fear of being spoiled until I've caught up, but here is a link I got from reading online newspapers:

Claire Tomalin about Charles Dickens and writing biographies, a very interesting interview, especially if like me you're intrigued by what biographers choose to focus on and what not, and how they relate to their subjects. It's also intriguing in terms of Tomalin as a female writer - she has some sharp things to say about Peter Ackyroyd and his treatment of the women in Dickens' life. And in terms of "it's a small world" - I didn't know Tomalin is married to another writer I much appreciate, Michael Frayn.

Now, on to reviewing DW again, several weeks after broadcast.

( You're trying to make me into you )

Found via hradzka, a great quote from Charles Dickens about himself, given to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1862:


"'He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.'"

As I said in my review for Girl in a blue dress, Dickens' behaviour towards his wife was really horrible, and you have the paradox of an author being able to describe, with great skill and sympathy for the victim, Edward Murdstone terrorizing his wife, David Copperfield's mother, into losing any sense of self-worth and joie de vivre, and a human being to seemed not to recognize that he was doing a very similar thing. Now that quote given to a future fellow novelist speaks of much greater self awareness on Dickens' part ("attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for" points pretty much to one person), and much as the act of creation often is subconscious rather than conscious, I'm not really that surprised that Dickens did the mirroring-into-the-villains thing deliberately rather than by accident. (Mind you, given that Uriah Heep or Miss Havisham are infinitely more interesting creations than Little Nell or Oliver Twist, it's an argument for the lack of vitality in "how I would like to be" characters owing something to the uncomfortable identification for villains as well.)

The quote is actually from this very interesting article about the question whether or not it matters to us, as readers, to discover favourite authors as not only flawed but sometimes downright unpleasant human beings. Whether it colours our reading, and why it should matter more than the awareness of the same thing about one'd dentist or a boing engineer, where it wouldn't influence the treatment of one's teeth or the use of the airplane the engineer co-build. I don't think there is a general answer to this; it's something each individual has to decide for themselves. It's certainly easier when the artist in question is dead, and you don't have the problem of supporting their livelihood by buying the books, attending their concerts etc., i.e. for example I can listen to recordings of Wagner operas or go to performances, when doing the same with a living, breathing Richard W., composing at the same high level but also spouting vicious antisemitism as he used to, would make me feel complicit in a way it just doesn't with him dead for more than a century. Or to use the Dickens example, I can read the novels without feeling I'm supporting spousal abuse. Though this might not be true for all dead artists and all their creations. I remember talking with rozk years ago about a similar subject, and she said the one work of literature which she really couldn't read the same way anymore if something theorized about its author were to be proven fact beyond the shadow of a doubt would be Alice in Wonderland (if it could be proven that Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson was an active pedophile). I think I agree on this point. Still, in general the "enjoy the work, even if the creator was rotten" theory for dead artists works for me.

With living artists, it becomes infinitely more difficult, and here the most recent example in the public consciousness isn't a writer but a director, Roman Polanski. After his thirty-years-delayed arrest last year, it seemed to me that there were two equally wrong arguments made, one pro and one anti Polanski; many of his defenders took the line of his deserving forgiveness due to the merits of his art, while some of the opposing camp instead of sticking to the irrefutable "rape is rape" argument also saw it fit to add what amounts to an "and Chinatown isn't that good anyway" argument. Now, I haven't seen all of Polanski's films, but I've seen several. On tv, not in the cinema, because the awareness of what he did made me not wanting to support him financially, and yet I was curious enough about the films in question to tune in when they were broadcast on tv. Between Dance of the Vampires, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, MacBeth (actually the first Polanksi film I saw, in school, as part of comparing various film versions of the Scottish Play), Frantic and The Ninth Gate, I came to the conclusion he is indeed in excellent director who produces the occasional dud (The Ninth Gate, I'm looking at you). That some of his films are good and some great, deserved classics, doesn't change anything about the criminality of his actions. The Ninth Gate isn't bad because he raped a 13-years-old, Frantic isn't good because he raped a 13-years-old. They both fall and stand in terms of characterisation and storytelling. If any of these films had had a Very Young Girl/Older Man theme, I don't think I could have made that work/author division even in a situation where I wasn't paying for watching them, but they didn't. That was my personal line to draw; others may draw it elsewhere.

And yet I'm not sure whether I agree with the conclusion the article about writers reaches, which is: But if we can't be good - and it seems that we can't - then it's not a bad thing to try to make something out of what is missing in us, or at least to see how others do it. And if we readers are complicitous - well, that's not a bad thing either. Because this seems to me a fall back on that "great art owes something to horrible deeds" position again. Sometimes it may; Dickens drawing on his own dark side to create some of his villains being a case in point. This doesn't mean one can handwave his behaviour. (Or, the other extreme, deny he was a great writer at all.) Sometimes there is no connection between an artist's dark side and his creations; I don't think Wagner would have composed any differently if he hadn't been an antisemite (he wasn't always one, you can pin point the time when he became one pretty accurately), though you could make an argument for his penchant for married women helping with the creation of Tristan and Isolde, but that's really not on the same scale as writing diatribe after diatribe about "the Jews" because you can't get over Meyerbeer's success in Paris. Either way: ideally every book/composition/film/other work of art should be judged on its own merits, independent from the creator's person, but in real life, all too often it just isn't possible to make that distinction, and I simply am not sure whether this is a good or bad thing because I keep wavering on the subject myself.

****

On a more cheerful subject: meddow has been watching the entirety of DS9 in recent weeks and after finishing it has made a great Kira character vid. It's odd, while I like Kira (quite a lot), she never was one of my favourite DS9 characters. Still isn't, but in recent years I've become aware of just what an amazing creation she was, and how sadly rare all that was accomplished still is. Kira was a female regular with a complicated, very dark backstory and an on screen character arc that went through all seven seasons; she had no romantic relationship to her show's nominal leading character and was still absolutely crucial to the show, arguably the actual main character, but even if you disagree with that assessment, she was the most important character in terms of screentime and narrative weight after Sisko, and she might have gotten more screentime than him, I didn't count the minutes. Now, can you think of any current show where the female lead is at no point of the story involved in a romantic relationship with the male lead, or where at the least her relationship with said male leading character isn't the most important one in her life? Any? Kira's storyarc was never about her love life, but she was never presented as asexual, either, her various romantic relationships were simply part of her story without ever dominating it, or depriving her of personality, or making all her other non-romantic relationships seem less important or non-existant. (Alas, Pod!Aeryn Sun in the fourth season of Farscape. Among others.) So yes, Kira was an amazing creation, and meddow's vid captures some of the reasons why beautifully.