Enchanted Prose

AMHERST’S author likes making connections, so let me suggest one: His thoughtful new novel is an ideal accompaniment to THE HALF BROTHER, my last posting: roughly the same New England locale; also set on a bucolic college campus; and both use poetry to explore provocative themes of love.  Though, poetry – Emily Dickinson’s – looms much larger here.

Seeking the meaning of love through Emily Dickinson’s poetry (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1880s/2012): Discovering a new author is exciting!  In this case, it’s William Nicholson, an award-winning British writer of screenplays, BBC television shows, novels (six contemporary ones with characters apparently connected to AMHERST) – whose writing experiences have skilled him in honing sharp prose that’s as irresistible, mysterious, and plaintive as the characters that inhabit this novel of two connected love affairs.  You’ll be hooked right by the opening sentences:

“The screen is black. The sound of a pen nib scratching on paper, the sound amplified, echoing in the dark room.  A soft light flickers, revealing ink tracking over paper.  Follow the forming letters to read:

I’ve none to tell me to but thee.

The area of light expands. A small maplewood desk, on which the paper lies. A hand holding the pen.

My hand, my pen, my words. My gift of love, ungiven.”

That’s Emily Dickinson’s voice, echoed in several short chapters evoking the “MYTH.”  These brief interludes are in tune with the reclusive poet (by now cloistered at her home, Homestead, for fifteen years), summoning the enigmatic poet who continues to captivate legions.  It’s a clue that Emily Dickinson’s poetry – and the “ghost of Emily Dickinson” – infuses this novel.  As it should.  For although the central voice is Alice Dickinson’s – of no kinship to the poet, again hinting at the author’s preference for connectedness – it’s Emily and her “strange poems” that casts the hypnotic spell.

Alice has come to Amherst from England to “give dignity” to a screenplay she aspires to write about an intense, historical love in a puritanical society: between Emily’s brother, Austin, a lonely soul in a bereft marriage who finds his soulmate late in life, and twenty-something Mabel Loomis Todd, newly arrived at Amherst College from Washington, DC, married to Austin’s colleague.

Since this is “Dickinson country” (Emily’s grandfather founded the college), Mabel, like today’s scholars, poets, and fans, can’t seem to get enough of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  Like me, you may find yourself re-reading the poems, interlaced throughout, twice, three times, to grasp their meaning.  The challenge is part of the mystique.  Nicholson tantalizes with glimpses of insight.  Of course, there’s a treasure trove of resources available to us: print, digital, and archival at Amherst and Harvard (Mabel/Austin’s love letters conserved at Yale), including those cited in the bibliography.  To confirm the poems are difficult, there’s even an Emily Dickinson Lexicon: 10,000 entries to help decode the words and references penned in her largesse of 1,800 poems.  Fascination with the 19^th century poetess is attributed to many factors, starting with the depth of her passions yet she spent most (or all?) of her life loveless, and secluded; why the subject of much speculation.

Another reason for Emily Dickinson’s popularity: “words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame.”  Her poems were a radical departure, hence underappreciated early on.  Contributing to their elusiveness are features such as the omission of all punctuation except for dashes; most lack titles; capitalizing words mid-sentence; rhythms that don’t rhyme.  There’s also the sheer breadth of themes beyond ordinary existence – nature, biblical, spiritual, death, immortality.  Like the Puritans of her day, she valued a simple life but she also defied accepted beliefs and customs, trusting her own individuality as the highest power.  Thus, she feels all-knowing and timeless.

Mabel Loomis Todd became obsessed with Emily’s poetry (and wanting to meet her). She sensed a powerful connection to this spirited woman who expressed emotions she felt for the “greatness, mystery, and depth of life.”  Her father, dear to her, introduced her to poetry, but it’s her dismay at the sleepy college coupled with her hunger for adventure and true happiness that sparked a ‘perfect storm’ for escaping into and idolizing Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  History ought to be indebted to Todd for her adoration, devotion, persistence and painstaking role, as depicted in the novel, in transcribing and getting a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems initially published.  The evolution of Mabel’s determination is seductive storytelling.

Mabel and Austin’s fated affair began innocently over a mutual love of nature.  The “joy of understanding” touched their souls.  Togetherness and physical love blossomed very slowly, discreetly, given the morality of the era, heightened by Austin’s sensibilities and morose acceptance of his unhappy destiny.  Eventually, though, their ardor finds its way into the privacy of Emily’s home, where you can feel Emily lurking as the lovers rendezvous in her living room.  (Emily doesn’t live in total isolation; there’s her spinster sister, Lavinia).  Austin’s home, Evergreens, is conveniently connected to Emily’s.  You can, like Alice, pay a visit: it’s the yellow home illustrated on Amherst’s telltale cover, now the Emily Dickinson Museum, which appears to be beautifully preserved.  It’s a testament to Nicholson’s writing that the reader wishes to visit there too.

Unlike Emily, Mabel is beautiful, stylish, aglow; she craves attention and attracts it from everyone.  Whereas Austin must hide his feelings from his cold, begrudging wife, Susan, Mabel is remarkably open with her unjealous husband about hers, for he’s candid about his extramarital desires.  David believes, even goes so far as encourages, the idea that loving more than one person at a time grows one’s capacity to love: “The more you love, the more love there is.”

The novel, like Emily Dickinson’s poems, respects a broad spectrum of types of love: romantic love, familial love, self-love, spiritual love, love of nature and the arts, enduring love.  It also raises connections among some.  For instance: Does a love for a father figure influence who you choose to love?  Nicholson makes sure you think hard about that question by structuring his novel with two love affairs, historical and contemporary, that draw interesting parallels:

Mabel Loomis Todd is in her mid-twenties when she falls deeply in love with a man old enough to be her father.  Alice is also in her twenties.  Her Dickinsonian research re-connects her to her former boyfriend, Jack, whose mother had an affair with Nick Crocker, a visiting English professor at Amherst.  Jack, in turn, connects Alice to Nick.  Alice is searching for a happy ending to her play because she too longs for the greatness of love.  Nick, like Austin, is also in his fifties.  He’s exceptionally handsome; all the women find him “irresistible.”  He lives in a “grand wedding cake of a house,” and like Austin is unhappily married.  An “old soul,” who can recite Emily’s poems.  Need I say more?

As Nicholson weaves in Mabel and Austin’s soul-searching letters and Emily’s heady poetry – “the lovers act, the poet reflects” – offering his own reflections, often punctuating a character’s crisp dialogue with their inner thoughts, he lets the reader in on what we’ve already been thinking: “How complicated it all is,” and “We all live our lives in hiding.”

When Nicholson asks us to ponder “What is there that’s bigger than love?” is the answer Alice’s happy ending?  A cache of nineteenth-century stirring letters and poems may hold the key: A love so profound it resides deep within one’s soul, blessed forever.  Until eternity.

Lorraine

Physical and spiritual love – a psychological novel (Massachusetts, roughly 1990s to post 9/11; Atlanta, earlier in backstories): Put on your thinking cap!  You’ll be lulled by the elegiac prose and the Currier & Ives imagery, but like our sensitive narrator who grew up in Atlanta suspecting “something easily missed, a golden egg hidden in the deepest underbrush,” you will too in this emotionally suspenseful, nuanced novel.  Yes, there are secrets and ah-ha moments, thoughtfully plotted, revealed slowly.  Even the title is thought-provoking.  It could have been plural since there’s two half-brothers.  But like everything that matters in Holly LeCraw’s cerebral novel, she makes us think.  What better vehicle than through the psyche of Charlie Garrett, who deems his best asset is he’s a “thinker.”  He “had to get closer and closer to things, all the time, see their astonishing thingness as thoroughly as I could.”

The first hint you’ll get comes early on in the novel as a poetry lesson and early in Charlie’s 17 years of teaching English at the Abbott School, a “cloister-let:” a small, picturesque New England boarding school perched atop “softer mountains than the Berkshires,” in Abbottsford, 90 miles from Boston in north-central Massachusetts.  The school/town may be fictitious, but this is the area of the country with the most private boarding schools; this one “genteelly clinging to the second-tier.” Charlie feels like a fraud because he got into Harvard and Abbott through the “old order” of wealth and connections.  But at 22, fresh in his first job, illuminating a complex 17^th century “metaphysical” poem divining physical and spiritual love, he soon validates his intellectual capabilities.

The arousing poem, “The Good-Morrow,” penned by John Donne, considered the “Father of “Metaphysical Poetry,” offers provocative, enlightened guidance for a senior class at the threshold of possibilities; and a superb choice for a soulful novel with tangled themes of physical versus spiritual love.  It’s met with faculty approval since on this campus “old-fashionedness was not discouraged.”  Charlie may be a novice struggling with his own identity, but his senses are spot-on:

“Look at every word.  Every word is there for a reason, probably ten reasons.  Get closer and closer.  Be patient.”  … Trust yourself.  These poems aren’t something to get.  They are something to apprehend.  Apprehend: to take hold of.  To pay attention.  Pay attention and the meaning will open up.”

One surprise I can impart without giving anything away is about the prose.  I expected the coolness of New England, not the warmth of Southern manners.  Actually, the prose is more a mix of North and South, ideal as Charlie, and other characters, have deep Southern roots.  Charlie’s sensitivity to his surroundings resonates in prose that combines the reserve of New Englanders with the elegance of Southerners. (Although, sometimes characters’ emotions let loose, unable to control all they’ve bottled up.)  The author is from Atlanta, now living outside Boston, which must account, in part, for the authentic feel of the prose.

The pull of home is ever-present.  It arrives with Charlie’s first impressions of the serene campus: “green rolling fields and white buildings, a chapel of gray stone – foreign and familiar, like scenes from a picture book.”  This “little farm of learning” was meant for him.  In boyhood, he discovered the magic of learning in his stepfather Hugh’s “leathery, book-lined study.” (Books were “like a time machine, taking me back and sideways to other minds and times and cities and planets.”)  He also values the students – “all of them, even those nature hadn’t favored … they were changelings, they were becoming.” Most dominant is Charlie’s home, “a thoroughly New England mishmash that, even so, struck me as a little southern.” At 29, he’s awfully young to own a large farmhouse abutting splendid mountains, a “destination.”  For ten years of this story, it emits such a strong presence, taking on “a life” of its own.

But Atlanta’s “ghosts were thick,” so they come North with him, where they hover, haunt, and shake-up Charlie’s three most important, emotionally-laden relationships, structured in sections titled May, Nicky, Anita.  The dynamics of all three twist and turn, shift in and out of Charlie’s life over the years.  Throughout, you’ll be amazed at the noble lengths he goes through to protect and honor these three.  When one of Charlie’s students asks if love is selfish, his moral compass shows us just how selfless love can be:

MAY: or “May-May,” an affectionate nickname that once mortified Charlie when a slip of his tongue in class, when May was his student during his second year teaching.  By then, it confirmed our sense that all along Charlie harbored passionate feelings for the young daughter of the school’s chaplain, Preston Bankhead, “an institution.” (Charlie aches to get closer to Preston’s “purported magic.” But even when he falls into being his chess partner he can’t; he “exuded intimacy only from far away, in the pulpit.”)  Charlie first spots May, a slender beauty, when she’s surrounded by her picture-perfect family (three blond brothers and blonde mother from Savannah; Preston from New Orleans.)  May grew up at Abbott.  Charlie adores everything about her: hands, hair, and eyes, “hemispheres of ocean and sky, and I was sailing over them using only the old knowledge of the stars” (Poetic words that echo Donne’s).  Among Charlie’s many admirable traits is endurance, so he patiently waits for May to mature.  When she does – that embarrassing incident in class – tenderly reveals his rapture.

NICKY: the other, younger half-brother.  The “favored son.” Glamorous, a golden-boy whose “red-gold curls draw the sun” and everyone to him like a magnet.  A math genius who appreciates the elegance of math but not its purpose, he sought relief work in Haiti and then Afghanistan, which couldn’t possibly have worked out for someone “who expected magic to pop out of a box or a song.”  So, Nicky follows his brother’s path to Abbott, where he “wants to scatter his light as he walks.”  Charlie always puts him first, but that light casts foreboding, dark shadows.  Nicky’s terrible sloppiness befits his fecklessness.

ANITA: whom Charlie never calls Mother.  Did he when it was just the twosome, before Nicky came along and Charlie became the outsider?  In Atlanta, whenever the threesome were together, Charlie “let them love each other, let them carry all the energy.”  Anita is well-suited as a nurse: practical, unruffled, and extremely discrete, except she’s that way with Charlie (“telling me anything would have been breaking our rules of engagement”) and Nicky, who doesn’t, or isn’t wired, to notice.  She too ends up at Abbottsford needing Charlie.

Other central characters bring diversity onto the campus, friendships and extended families for Charlie, plus emotional sub-plots:

THE MIDDLETONS: Charlie’s Jewish landlord, Anita; her African American husband, Booker, the school’s groundskeeper; and one of their children, Zack, who becomes a popular football star in Charlie’s class with loftier aspirations.

THE LOWELLS: Divya, Charlie’s colleague, from India; and husband Win whose dedication/obsession for caring for a labyrinth of boxwoods planted by their home’s original owners, a nostalgic nod to the Mississippi plantation home they left behind, takes on mythical significance about those who came before us and after.

Given all Charlie’s musings about someone’s physical versus spiritual presence/absence/essence, it’s ironic that this “thinker” doesn’t perceive his greatest asset is how profoundly he embodies what he teaches about John Donne’s poem – “that soul thing” – which is why this novel shines.

Lorraine

A seascape shaping WWI history, artists, and fiction: The year Scottish architect/artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh painted there (Suffolk Coast, England, 1914-1915): This gorgeously written novel paints moods with words – wistful, soulful, hopeful – blending facts and fiction the way warm and cool watercolors blend into one another.  The painted canvas, Mr. Mac and Me, is perceived as earthy tones, understated beauty that glows.

Aesthetic prose is exquisitely fitting since this is partly a biographical novel about the year the misunderstood Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, escaped to the alluring Suffolk coastline of England immersing his melancholy self into his early artistry: flower watercolors.  Esther Freud has matched the mood of Mackintosh’s beautiful watercolors with her atmospheric prose.

First, a confession.  I fell in love with this novel – or the idea of it – before it transported me; before I laid eyes on its lovely purple bell fritillaria cover, depicting one of Mackintosh’s painstakingly painted flowers.  He made this watercolor in 1915 when he lived in the small seaside village of Walberswick, as WWI dawned – the same village Esther Freud lives in.  Sitting on Britain’s northeastern coast near London, surrounded by a string of villages (Southwold, with its ferries, the largest), it hugs the North Sea across from Belgium, where battles were fought.  I was charmed by the author’s 400-year-old stone cottage, where you can envision her inspired to poetically craft Mr. Mac and Me, her ninth novel.  To see if you might be as enamored, see At Home with Esther Freud.

The parallels between Freud’s background and the novel also fascinate.  Her father was the artist, Lucian Freud, considered a leading British portraitist of the 20^th century.  The author, then, grew up in an artistic home watching her father paint, like her story’s narrator watches “Mr. Mac.” Lucian Freud’s work is characterized as “moody.”  His daughter has penned a wonderfully moody novel.  The prose has a poignancy and air of mystery and wonder about “Mr. Mac” and Suffolk’s land and sea, a powerful presence rich with wild, low-lying vegetation.  Freud lures us into the daily chores and comings-and-goings of village life “where there’s nothing that gets by a village this size.”

The “Me” in the title is the narrator: 13-year-old Thomas Maggs, who strikes up a warm friendship with “Mr. Mac.” He’s mature beyond his years, having had to bear the burden of being the only surviving son of six brothers (he has two sisters, Ann and Mary), and a useless alcoholic father.  The family runs an inn, with one of the village’s two pubs attached.

Tommy’s voice is sensitive.  He and “Mr. Mac” have several things in common: physical disability (Mackintosh was born with a club foot, whereas Tommy’s “twisted foot” seems due to a sinister cause he’s averse to explaining); a passion for drawing; a keen appreciation for Nature; vigilant beholders of the sea; and a palpable lonesomeness borne from their “longings.”

Today Charles Rennie Mackintosh is acknowledged as the “Father of the Glasgow Style,” famous for designing the Glasgow School of Arts, which tragically caught fire around the time the novel went to press! (Restoration underway.) But in the early 1900s, his avant-garde Art Deco designs, which enveloped the totality of a structure (interior as well as exterior), were not well-accepted in his native Glasgow as they were in Europe, especially Germany and Austria.  I’d never heard of Mackintosh until now.  He has legions of followers (www.crmsociety.com).

Mackintosh is spotted roaming the seashore at night with “spyglasses.”  Since “this is where the enemy could land,” and he “looks for all the world like a detective,” Tommy is naturally wary of him.  He also speaks a dialect that’s hard for Tommy to understand; it sounds German.  I googled it: Glasweigian (or The Glasgow Patter) is spoken in Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, where the summertime “herring girls,” Betty and Meg hail from.  It doesn’t help that everyone in the neighboring villages is being urged to be on the lookout once the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA) was enacted in August 1914 and posted along the Southwold pier.

Mac and Tommy’s friendship begins by walking the sea together.  Then Tommy starts spending time in the Mackintoshes’ loving home.  Kind Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh is also an artist, known for her unconventional gesso panels adorned with Glasgow roses.  After Mackintosh gives Tommy a box of watercolors, they draw together in a “thick, warm silence.” Tommy realizes “Mac is not a danger.  I can see that now.  He may have even been sent here to keep us safe.”  Unfortunately, others believe he may be a German spy.  How sad for an artist who “made places for poets.”

Tommy is drawn to the sea, but his mother seeks a different life for him.  So he draws boats anchored on the waters and battleships from ship models encased in glass cabinets in the Sailors’ Reading Room, where he sneaks away to when he’s not tied down to his many responsibilities at home and school.  One is a paying job as assistant to rope-maker George Allard, turning a wheel.  Rope-making is a “dying art,” laments Allard.  The war needs metal for barbed wire, not rope.

Tommy recognizes Charles Rennie Mackintosh is “nothing like any of the artists that I’ve seen.” He’s seen plenty, inspired by the coastline.  (Danky, a villager Tommy looks in on, models for artists.)  By now, Tommy endeavors to see the world through Mac’s eyes.  He’ll stare at:

“one pebble shaped like a heart – or almost – and I think of the pamphlet of Mac’s designs.  There were hearts carved into a bookcase, and a cluster of them floating high up in the panel of a bedroom door.  There were small dropping hearts in lamps, and most beautiful of all, a square of metal molded to the rise of a heart.”

Mackintosh’s heart is best revealed through romantic letters he wrote to “My Margaret,” as she often had to leave him for lengthy periods of time to tend to family crises.  She affectionately called him Toshie.  He writes: “There are only three important words that could take the place of the rest.  I Love You.  I hope you find them here in every line.”

The haunting drumbeat of war is sketched into sentences too: in the names of battles Tommy must memorize at school – Battle of Tannenberg, Heligoland, Bight, Siege of Tsingtao; in the sounds of guns heard as far away as Flanders, and then, closer, overhead, the Zeppelins; in the canons that must be buried on Gun Hill; in Ann’s anguish Jimmy Kerridge may have perished on the HMS Formidable in the Channel nearby, a battleship Tommy drew. “Ann needs me,” he says, racing to console her.  We want to embrace this compassionate young fellow with dreams of the sea.  Mackintosh feels warmly about “our boy” too.

It’s that same warm emotion Freud keeps brushing in with the somber, buoying us: a landscape blessed with daffodils, celandine, hawthorn, sweet william, gorse, aubretia, heather-bell, larkspur, bluebells, hyacinth, hellebores, narcissus, witch-hazel, elderflower, anemone, and yes, those lovely fritillaries.

Moved by the landscape, Mackintosh painted flowers “fresh and breathing.”  Esther Freud matches him with “fresh and breathing” prose.

Lorraine

Dreams vs. Realities: The Golden Age of Hollywood at the Brink of War (1938-1939): A Touch of Stardust is an old-fashioned Valentine’s gift for the cinephiles and dreamers among us.

If it were a box of fancy chocolates, the package would be elegantly wrapped.  Upon opening, each mouthwatering piece would appear carefully formed and placed.  All would look soft and creamy, but when you bite into some you discover hidden ingredients, nudging you to contemplate textures and tastes you hadn’t expected.  Since these delicacies are equally well-made and the surprises don’t overpower, you eat them all, impressed by the thoughtfulness that must have gone into their creation.

A Touch of Stardust, then, is a well-thought out, well-researched historical novel that is more than a tribute to the halcyon days of Hollywood moviemaking when studio moguls “ruled this world of make-believe,” creating larger-than-life movies and movie stars.  Yet not all the “fairy-tale” glamour is as magical as the Stardust title suggests; serious themes are raised.  What consistently sparkles is the smoothness of Alcott’s prose, never hitting us over the head but making sure she’s gifted us something meaningful, not just decadent, to chew on.

This is Alcott’s third historical novel casting strong female characters (The Dressmaker, The Daring Ladies of Lowell).  It’s a romantic Hollywood tale showcasing grand filmmaking, with enough juicy Hollywood gossip to feel like we’re getting the inside story.

Julie Crawford, a recent graduate of the elite women’s Smith College, has come to Hollywood to escape Fort Wayne, Indiana, pinning her hopes on becoming a screenwriter.  Her parents have given her a year to prove herself.  Julie masks her beauty in a town obsessed by it, wearing eyeglasses she doesn’t need, so she’ll be taken seriously.  She was inspired by the great female screenwriter, Frances Marion, who once spoke at her college.  When Julie sees first-hand how respected her idol is in Hollywood (for decades Marion was the highest paid Hollywood screenwriter in a town where men have beat out women for the highest paying jobs), we’re tickled Julie set her sights on such a worthy icon.

Could the author have chosen a more perfect movie to anchor her novel around than Gone with the Wind – the top grossing film of all time – and still, 75 years later, provoking controversy?

Clark Gable, “King of Hollywood,” seemed destined to play Rhett Butler, but fiercely independent producer David O. Selznick, of Selznick International Pictures, whose “passion for perfection was legendary,” reportedly screened 1,400 actresses for the role of Scarlett.  Winning out over actresses like Katherine Hepburn (not in the novel) and Carole Lombard (looms large in the novel) – crazy in love with not-yet divorced Gable – Selznick banked on a British actress, Vivien Leigh, with “skin as luminous as a bed of pearls.” His Scarlett (very much “his”: he fired the first director, George Cukor; the film was then directed by Victor Fleming) looked as though “she could have just stepped by magic from the pages of a Civil War History book.”

Could there be a more perfectly fictionalized character for Julie to become romantically entwined with than the handsome, older/wiser, Columbia graduate Andy Weinstein, whose Jewish identity is a sensitive theme?  He spent his childhood in Berlin living with his grandparents, “the two people he loved more than any.”  Now, justifiably, he’s full of angst about their fate as the movie was under production when Europe was at the brink of war.  Even when the two first met, Andy bluntly asks Julie if she is “put off by my name?” While she quickly replies of course not, her words haunt her as novel unfolds.

There is much to like about Andy.  He recognizes Julie’s refinement and innocence, treats her gentlemanly.  But he’s balancing so much pressure on-and-off the job, he’s not always able to be as available and emotionally open as she deserves.  (“Being with Andy sometimes felt like swinging on a trapeze quite high above the ground.”)  Andy is Selznick’s right-hand assistant, which means he must stay on top of a zillion production logistics for a “sloppy monster of a movie with an unfinished script that lots of people predict will go down as the biggest disaster in film history.”

Carole Lombard is the historical character who touches us the most.  With “her heart in her eyes,” what comes out of the mouth of the “Profane Angel” may not be enchanted prose but it sure feels authentic.  Early on in the novel, Carole asks Julie to be her personal assistant, thus offering Julie “a wave of energy that seemed capable of lifting anyone off his or her toes.”  Their professional relationship blossoms into a soulful friendship.  Stardust, then, is also more than a generalized tribute to Old Hollywood; it’s a specific nod of appreciation to a beautiful, gutsy, comedic actress who hailed from Julie’s Midwestern hometown.  You’ll read more about her life story in the “Epilogue,” which is when it hit me why the author wanted Lombard to emotionally reach us.

Another historical character you’ll root for, despite his notorious womanizing, is Clark Gable.  For one thing, he genuinely adores Carole.  It’s his expressions of outrage at the discrimination and hypocrisy towards the treatment of the black actors and actresses in the film, both on and off the set, which endears him to us.  Two in particular: Mammie, played by Hattie McDaniel, (who went on to become the first African American to win an Oscar for Supporting Actress); and Butterfly Queen (whose glorified and stereotypical role as Scarlett’s content, not very bright servant is one vexing aspect of “GWTW.”)  Against Gable’s (and apparently Selznick’s) objections, Hattie and Butterfly were barred from attending the movie’s three-day premiere in Atlanta.  Margaret Mitchell’s novel may have won the Pulitzer-prize, but we’re reminded this was Jim Crow South.  That’s why when Gable goes wild on the LA set shouting “this isn’t the Deep South,” when he spots segregated bathroom signs and threatens to quit unless they’re removed, we really like him and he feels real to us.

One reason Stardust feels so authentic must be the author’s Hollywood connections.  She married into the famous Mankiewicz screenwriting family.  Surely it was fun writing a scene in which fictional Andy escorts fictional Julie to her first Hollywood star party (he’d been taking her to the “Place Where the Stars Eat,” Chasen’s, now closed after 60 years) at the Beverly Hills home of the “classy writer” Herman Mankiewicz.  At that time, he was finishing The Wizard of Oz.  Andy, in his no-nonsense way, informs Julie that “if you’re looking for intellect, you find it here.”

This party is memorable because here is where Julie is formally introduced to Frances Marion.  (F. Scott Fitzgerald was present too.  He was working on the troubled script.  Andy’s advice: he “should be writing novels, far from Hollywood.)  Mankiewicz’s home is also where Julie overhears opinionated conversations about America’s entry into WWII.  Many proclaim it’s not our war.  Not Andy, whose resentment of Hollywood powerhouses like Louis B. Mayer “pretending they aren’t Jewish” was far more than just personal: Up until America entered the war, Hollywood stayed clear of making movies about the Nazis, for fear of offending international audiences.  A sorry bit of cinematic history.

Alcott makes sure we don’t linger too long on this.  Lightly, she drops in Hollywood notables like gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons; lavish costume designer, Edith Head; Laurence Olivier, married and openly having an affair with Vivien Leigh (Yes, Selznick was “afraid of scandal;” sometimes Scarlett had to be appeased); and the all-mighty Mayer, head of MGM, Selznick’s father-in-law, for whom he once worked.

Julie marvels how “actors step in and out of reality so brilliantly.”  Carole’s screenwriting advice to Julie: “create a set, sprinkle a touch of stardust.” Together, they sum up the author’s polished prose, seamlessly blending her imagination into realities.  Julie feels as real to us as Carole Lombard.  That’s the art.  The stardust.

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Lorraine

Nostalgic for more Hollywood?  See American Blonde and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures.

Seeking justice when Separate is not Equal (From NYC to “Jim Crow” Mississippi, 1945-1946):  The Secret of Magic is the kind of writing that inspired this blog.

You can hear the musicality in Johnson’s prose, resonating the cadence of the Deep South.  When the narrator – Regina Mary Robichard, a young black lawyer from Harlem working for Thurgood Marshall, founder of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) – travels to Mississippi to investigate the death of a decorated black WWII veteran, it’s the same “cadence that strolled through words and that branded Regina as an outsider.”  Prose that sings a distinctive beat evoking Southern sounds, a “syncopated rhythm” reflected in phrases like “jitterbugged” leaves and “uh-uh-uh in the shake of his head.”  Prose that’s a joy to read when recalling the “dense, lush moisture” of the landscape, smells of sweet olive, and an “old-timey” vision of Southern gentility (“dimpled hands holding tightly onto glasses of what looked like iced tea”).  But the prose also tells a tragic story rooted in truth, of a very painful time in our nation’s history when “Jim Crow” laws racially segregated the Southern states where the Confederate flag waved.  The contrast between “something that might look good outside but is evil” couldn’t be starker, more dramatic.  So why, I’m guessing, haven’t you heard about this novel?  With the newly released paperback, let’s hope word spreads.

The ebb and flow of the prose adds texture to the novel’s complexities and paradoxes.  Set in a racially segregated fictitious town in Mississippi at the end of WWII, Revere is unlike Regina’s Harlem “where the races rarely mingled.”  Rather, it’s:

“a place where black people and white people were all jumbled together, had built up a land, and still lived, in a sense, right on top of each other, constantly traipsing in and out of one another’s lives.  So close that they couldn’t just naturally be separated.”

Yet, separated they were.  By law. The injustice and absurdity of proclaiming “separate and equal.”  It is within this historical time period that the novel opens, with the arrival of a thick, fancy envelope at the Fund’s Fifth Avenue office, addressed to Thurgood Marshall, already a legendary civil rights leader.  The package is from Miss Mary Pickett Calhoun, requesting Marshall look into the death of Lieutenant Joe Howard Wilson, son of her family’s long-time help, Willie Willie.  Inside were cryptic news-clippings and a photograph that grabbed Regina – whose character is based on Constance Baker Motley, the first black female attorney who worked for Marshall at the LDF.  “Reggie,” who clerked for Marshall in law school and “idolized” him, convinces Marshall to let her take on the case.  By now, Marshall believes to “really affect this country – we have got to move on to changing the law, not trying the individual cases that break it.”  He agrees, but only for three weeks’ time despite all-expenses paid.  The NAACP, you see, is flooded with cases.

Regina loves the law.  Her mother, a legend in her own right, the first black woman to graduate from Columbia’s Teachers College, has been fighting for justice too: for the passage of Federal anti-lynching laws.  Regina’s father was lynched in Omaha in 1919.

Regina’s drawn to this case for two more compelling reasons:

• Miss Mary Pickett Calhoun is “M. P. Calhoun,” author of a children’s book she coveted; its title aptly, The Secret of Magic. That novel brought fame and fortune to that author, and inspired Regina with “spunky black heroes in a white book.”  No wonder it’s still banned in the Deep South!  The reader already senses that its murderous tale involving black and white playmates parallels Johnson’s story.  Hence, The Secret of Magic is a novel within a novel, a creative undertaking Johnson pulls off eloquently.  Save the Author’s Note for last, as it appears.  The full impact of Johnson’s art and intentions will hit you.
• How is it possible that the recipient of the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross survived the battlefields of Italy but doesn’t make it home to Mississippi on an interstate bus? How is it possible that this black veteran singled out for “exceptional bravery” still “does not have the right to vote in Mississippi, his native state?”

A few things to keep in mind about Miss Mary Pickett Calhoun: She’s about twice Regina’s age, with “skin as white and translucent as a good Minton china cup.” Her daddy was the late Judge Calhoun, so powerful he kept the Ku Klux Clan out of Revere.  His portrait still hangs in the county courthouse, where the Confederate Flag still flies, where we see Regina bravely enter.  And yet, he’s also the man who hunted with Willie Willie; taught Willie Willie to read; made sure Willie Willie lived in a cabin behind the Calhoun’s antebellum mansion, not the typical outhouses of the day; paid for his son to attend Morehouse College; and counseled that if his son got out of Revere he’d make something of himself.

That may sound encouraging but the reader already knows that this black hero’s death was no accident, from the moment he refuses to give up his paid seat for German POWs when they board the Bonnie Blue Line bus.  (This is ten years before Rosa Parks makes her stand.)  This tense scene hits Joe hard for even a war – “the long horror of it – hadn’t changed one thing” in the segregated South.

Willie Willie knows his son’s death was no accident too.  Quite possibly, he’s even figured out who’s responsible for his murder by the time he picks Regina up at the bus depot.  Yes, the same bus route the lieutenant traversed, then disappeared.  Still, Willie Willie is an upbeat narrator, explaining to Regina why the town is so “pretty” (saved during the Civil War), dotted with grand “Victorian gingerbread” houses.  It doesn’t seem to matter, thinks Regina and the reader, that they were constructed by slaves.  For this is Willie Willie’s “home place,” the only home he’s ever known.  Could the meaning of home be more potent?  Discrepancies are everywhere.

Take for instance, Regina.  She tells us she’s a careful person, yet she’s thrust herself into the center of attention in a place where everyone is enmeshed in everyone else’s business.  Then there’s Miss Calhoun, raised with fine Southern manners, but she’s gruff with Regina and withholds information.  How could she possibly understand the secrets of a place like Revere?  Everyone in this town bears secrets, including Miss Mary, who has “never been able to figure out exactly who it is I can trust.”  Willie Willie comes closest.  Regina, though, is undeterred.  Watching the dance of their black-and-white female relationship is fascinating.

Little by little, Regina is handed clues by a couple of the town’s characters.  One is Peach Mottley, who did/still does the laundry for wealthy white families (the very same Peach in M. C. Calhoun’s novel.)  Another is a black attorney, Tom Raspberry, whose office is located in Catfish Alley, which “sounded like home.”  It seemed to be the only place in Revere that was like the rest of the postwar country, an “active hive of rebuilding.”  When Regina pays a visit to Tom:

“just being surrounded by black folks again was a relief.  Her shoulders loosened.  Her step lightened.  It was a lot of work to become “American,” like everybody else.  You always had to be on your guard.”

Tom offers hope that “things are changing.  Some deep foundations starting to shake.”   But as the plot thickens, Johnson wants to remind us that “good or bad, throughout the nation, it was the South pumped the heartbeat of so much.”

Lorraine