Shouts from a Third Act

When Irish-born author Maggie O’Farrell wrote HAMNET: A Novel of the Plague, set in the late 1500s, she had no idea that a future Pandemic would soon rattle the globe. HAMNET was her eighth novel, but she’d been wanting to write a story involving Shakespeare’s son for a long time, ever since learning of his existence in high school. The book’s publication in late March of last year happened to coincide with the covid shut-down. 

All the novels I’ve read/devoured/lost myself in during the Pandemic were a powerful antidote to the news that battered me every day, culminating in the siege of our U.S. Capitol on January 6^th. Five people died. Protesters-turned-domestic terrorists beat some of the outnumbered Capitol Police officers with fire extinguishers, flagpoles, hockey sticks, and fists. The Insurrection could have turned out far worse if the mob had gotten their hands on Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi and others. Some in the crowd were out for blood. Why? Because they believed the Big Lie.

I love a great novel, but I loathe a Big Lie. Here’s the difference. A great novel is a make-believe story that connects with readers because it sheds fresh light on the human condition. A great novel can shake us to our core or lift us up, even when bad things happen to good characters. The story’s big reveal can be earth shattering or quietly profound, but it sneaks up on us and surprises.

A Big Lie also sneaks up on us and surprises. A Big Lie is somebody repeating the same falsehood over and over again to get something they want very, very badly. I’m reminded of Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. Madoff swindled thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Year after year, he told them he was so good at investing that, unlike his peers, he never lost money and could guarantee his investors consistent returns. He ‘proved’ this by sending them make-believe financial statements and real checks when they asked for pay-outs. In fact, those pay-outs were put together from money he got from Peter to pay Paul. And when new investors like Peter dried up because of the 2008 financial crisis, his Big Lie was exposed. There were no more pay-outs. Madoff was arrested. But up until then, he got what he wanted: a reputation as a kind of magician-money manager and extraordinary wealth for himself and his family.

But let me return to the novel HAMNET. I want to shout about it because it’s that good.

Hamnet is a make-believe story based on the few facts that exist about the life of William Shakespeare, arguably the greatest dramatist the world has ever known. O’Farrell used three of the known facts to craft her story:

1. A couple living in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in the 1580s had three children: Susanna and the twins, Hamnet and Judith
2. The boy Hamnet died in 1596, age eleven
3. About four years later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet. (In Shakepeare’s day, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.)

This is a novel about family, love, and grief, but it’s also about possibility. The possibility of grief transporting a person to greater purpose. The person may never lose sight of the tragedy that inspired it, but by honoring the loved one in a way that touches the lives of others, he may begin to heal.

Eleven year-old Hamnet is searching for his mother; then, when he can’t find her, his older sister, his grandparents, his aunts and uncles. His father isn’t home. He works in London, only returning for visits. Hamnet is a sweet boy, tall for his age and smart but easily distracted. He locates his grandfather, but the ill-tempered man–a once prosperous glove maker and former mayor who has run up debts and town resentments–throws a cup at his head, cutting him, and Hamnet is forced to flee before he can reveal that his twin sister Judith is ill.

The story circles back fifteen years to the day his father met his mother, and how they came to marry. Neither family, except for the bride and groom, is particularly happy about the marriage, but she is three months pregnant (not uncommon at the time.)

A young man, 18, is in a farmhouse tutoring two young boys in Latin when he spies a young woman at the edge of the forest with a hawk perched on her fist. His father the glove maker has sent him there to satisfy a debt to the farmer, who has died, leaving behind a widow and many children. Agnes, 26, is the child of the farmer’s much loved first wife, who died giving birth to their third child. The farmer’s second wife resents Agnes, who is everything she is not.

The focal point of the book is Agnes and her relationship with her family and her husband. (In town records, Shakespeare’s wife is named as Anne Hathaway, but it’s also a fact that her father called her Agnes in his will and bequeathed her a dowry.) In the novel, Agnes is a herbalist and a bee keeper; a healer and an intuitive. When she meets the young tutor, she is lonely for human contact. She is isolated on the farm and by her stepmother, who doesn’t want much to do with her.

In interviews, O’Farrell has said she had two main inspirations for the novel. One was Hamnet. The second was Agnes/Anne: very little is known about her, too, apart from the fact she was older than her husband. And yet, history has not been kind to her, in part because she stayed in Stratford with her children while Shakespeare lived in London in pursuit of his career, returning home for visits. Biographers, scholars, screenwriters and other novelists have speculated she was a cradle-snatcher, a nymphomaniac, and a shrew.

“We’re fed this idea that she was an ignorant peasant strumpet who tricked this genius boy into marriage, and he hated her and had to run away to London to escape. Where is this coming from? Why are people so wedded to the idea of the fancy-free male artist that they have to put her down?” Maggie O’Farrell, speaking with The Guardian in September 2020

Instead, O’Farrell makes the intuitive leap that Shakespeare became who he was because his wife encouraged him to go to London. Agnes knows he’s miserable working for his father, and she senses he needs to find his way to something else.

[She has] A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command. –a passage from HAMNET

This isn’t such a leap. Shakespeare, after he became a successful playwright, bought his family the second most expensive house in Stratford. And it is to there he returned in his retirement.

The novel is written in modern language but there’s a beautiful poetic rhythm to the prose. And O’Farrell plunges us into the sights, smells and endless domestic chores of life in Elizabethan England. Twenty-first century politics aside, I’m very glad not to have lived in the 16^th century.

The cause of Hamnet’s death is not recorded, but he died in high summer during a plague year. Which brings us back to the subject of grief. O’Farrell herself is a mother of three. She knows that though nothing is recorded of Hamnet, apart from the dates of his birth and death, his parents surely suffered his loss.

She thinks, this cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realize it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead. He is dead. He is dead. –a passage from HAMNET

In this country, the Pandemic has killed more than 400,000 people, at least as many as we lost during World War II. Without the Big Lie, many Americans would not have been wasting their grief over a “stolen election.” Democracy dodged a bullet on January 6^th, but gun smoke still lingers in the air. And grief. But shouldn’t our collective grief now turn to those we’ve lost, with hope that we can wipe out this Pandemic, put people back to work, and hug–without fear–our old friends and new acquaintances?

Dear Readers, I ask you to think of this Norman Rockwell painting as my Holiday Greeting Card. It’s one answer to the gravest of questions: How do we as Americans come together after this terrible, horrible, really bad year?

“The Golden Rule” appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on April 1, 1961. The magazine is no longer around, but back in the day, it was a big deal. And this cover was a big deal. For much of its existence, the Post couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t show minorities on its covers. As for the painting itself, it has an interesting history—as does its creator Normal Rockwell—and it reflects the heart of an America that I think most of us want to know and love.

The painting began as a drawing inspired by the creation of the United Nations (1945), to express hope in its peacekeeping mission. The completed drawing featured 65 people representing the world’s nations surrounding key members of the U.N.’s Security Council (US, UK, and Russia—the USSR at the time). Rockwell did extensive research for the piece but abandoned the project because he felt out of his depth. By 1961, he’d been working for the Saturday Evening Post for close to half a century, having done his first cover in 1916 when he was all of twenty-two. By 1961, Rockwell, then 67, was seeing the world in all its complexities. He was celebrated for his often-humorous depictions of small-town America, but his view of America had expanded.

“Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” Norman Rockwell

Rockwell’s Golden Rule “DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU” Saturday Evening Post cover coincided with the early years of the Civil Rights movement. Unlike his original drawing, the painting features no diplomats. Instead, Rockwell focuses on the idea of common humanity. (For that cover, Rockwell received hate mail, the first in his 45-year career with the magazine.) Then, in 1985, the painting/message was given new life when it was reimagined as a giant mosaic that was gifted to the U.N. by First Lady Nancy Reagan on behalf of the United States. There it remains in the U.N.’s New York City headquarters.

Norman Rockwell was an American success story. Born in NYC, he dropped out of high school to attend art school. Before he turned sixteen, he’d painted his first commission—Christmas cards. He was still in his teens when the Boy Scouts hired him as the art director for Boys’ Life. He created 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, eventually leaving in 1963 to work for Look magazine. He married and raised three sons and moved from New York City to rural Vermont to the small town of Stockton, MA, where he died in 1978. He’s still very much a part of the town. Years ago, friends and I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum, located in “The Old Corner House” on Main Street, which was filled with paintings donated by Rockwell as part of a trust he set up. To gaze at all those originals–the stories they told; the level of detail–is a memory I still carry with me. Today if you wish to visit the museum, it has a new home in a spacious building on a big spread of land.

We all love an American success story, but right now an American patriot story sounds even more appealing. A year before he died, Norman Rockwell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Ford. Rockwell was more than just a famous 20^th century painter/illustrator whose work made us smile. In 1943, Rockwell was inspired by President Roosevelt’s wartime address to Congress.  Rockwell created what came to be known as “The Four Freedoms” paintings: Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear. Each of the four ran in consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post, accompanied by essays by contemporary writers. The magazine got together with the U.S. Treasury Dept. and sponsored an exhibit of the paintings that toured the States and promoted the sale of war bonds. In effect, Rockwell’s Freedom paintings raised more than $130 million for the war effort. His first cover for Look was “The Problem We All Live With,” one of the most iconic paintings of the Civil Rights era, for which he received more hate mail. It’s a portrait of a young black girl in a bright white dress being escorted to school by four U.S. Marshalls. It was based on a real-life incident in 1960, when a six year-old girl named Ruby Bridges was escorted to school in New Orleans while an angry mob shouted and threw things at her.

Throughout his career, Norman Rockwell painted scenes from small town America, but his work also illustrated some of his deepest concerns and interests, including Civil Rights, America’s war on poverty, and space exploration. He was a man of great talent, human empathy, and he was an American patriot.

Wishing you and yours a better, happier, healthier New Year in 2021. With gratitude to Norman Rockwell.

Thanksgiving is behind us, but Covid isn’t. The holidays are approaching, and so, too, is a new President and his administration. This seems like a good time to get philosophical, especially when we’re all in various stages of recovery after our polarized election.

Marilynne Robinson—novelist, essayist, professor, and life-long student of history—is someone whose morality, intellect and strong religious faith have earned her the respect of both liberals and conservatives. She was a recent guest on “The Ezra Klein Show,” a podcast that discusses the politics of the day, among other timely topics. Ezra is what I’d call a ‘civilized’ interviewer. He’s well-versed in facts and has his opinions, but he welcomes different points of view and is quick to acknowledge the accomplishments of administrations and political figures with which he might otherwise disagree. There are no heated arguments; his interviews are thoughtful and illuminating.

As Ezra said when introducing Marilynne Robinson, “Her work is inextricably bound up with the most important issues of our time—race, religion, education, geography, and democracy.”

DEMOCRACY. Today Marilynne Robinson is 77 years-wise and revered on both sides of the Atlantic, but she grew up modestly in a tiny lumber town in Idaho. It was a time when education was valuable in its own right. “A tremendous privilege.” She went to a “minor” public high school, but she was taught Shakespeare and Latin and came to realize that with any work of literature, “the assumption is that a human life matters.” Our democracy, she says, comes very directly out of the assertion of human equality. Equality based on the sanctity of the individual person, each one of us having been created by God.

Democracy, in her own words:

“We have to keep our democracy alive because we are the culture that the world looks to, to see if democracy is possible.”

“If democracy works, that’s a moral achievement. That means you respect yourself and you extend that respect to other people.”

“We participate in democracy not just by dropping a ballot, but by being the kind of citizen that other people need to believe we are.” 

“If you disrupt an orderly government, you bring disorder that will bring a disorderly government. There’s lots of history to that effect.”

Ms. Robinson has called Iowa City home for much of her adult life. Four years ago she retired from her teaching position at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop; she was on staff there, in 2005, when she received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gilead. Twenty-four years earlier, her first novel Housekeeping was a finalist for the Pulitzer. In between, she raised two sons, taught at several other universities here and abroad; wrote numerous non-fiction essays that were published in newspapers and magazines and as collections. Gilead spawned three additional novels: Home, Lila and this year’s Jack. (In the first of the four, we meet John Ames, a third generation Congregationalist minister nearing the end of his life, who is writing a letter to his young son about their family.) She continues to write essays and is a sought-after guest speaker at different institutions, including churches.

She has long studied history because it interests and informs her. She relies on primary texts, whenever they’re available, because “you realize how much has fallen out of history” the further away you get from that period in time. “The point of history,” she said, “is to make you aware of how human beings behave, how wide the margin is that civilized societies consider appropriate. But in fact there’s a tremendous amount of craziness of all kinds that is discoverable in history and contemporary societies.”

About the craziness in today’s politics and our great divide, she says:

“I think if you see another person as evil, you are effectively blinded. If we cannot assume that people arrive at the positions they hold in good faith, then we have no basis for reconciliation, for compromise, for consensus, all the things we lack right now.”

“If your resistance to people is non-negotiable, as their’s is to you, then we have already stepped out of the realm of what is possible to a democratic culture.”

The main problem, she thinks, is that we’ve lost trust with each other, and the only way to regain trust is to deserve it. “That requires real self-restraint.” And courtesy, generosity and scrutinizing our own ethical soundness, she says.

Back in high school, an English teacher gave her a piece of advice she’s used as a guiding principle: “You will live with your mind for the rest of your life, so make it a good companion.” She’s used her mind to ask herself the big questions, such as: If we’re so rich, why do we impoverish so many things? “I have a feeling now that we’re sailing along on the accomplishments of other generations, but we’re not adding much that’s positive and, in fact, we’re allowing things to decay or we’re corrupting things.”

For all the flaws in our society, Marilynne Robinson is awed by the preciousness of life. Over the years she’s told all her students that the human brain is the most complex object to exist in the universe. “We are profoundly complex. We are profoundly able. We don’t know what we are. Our course in life is to discover who we are and what we are.”

There’s much more wisdom in the podcast than I’ve reported here (to listen to all of it, look for the 10/14 podcast, #372), but I’ll conclude with her description of our democracy up until now, and why we need to keep it alive. They are words that gave me the good kind of chills:

“What it’s meant up to this point is a tremendous explosion of education throughout the culture, a vigorous press that you don’t find elsewhere, people who, at their best moments, remember that they are the government and are responsible for it. The potential for good in a democracy. The potential for making sure that the land is treated well and that the cities are respected and served and so on. That we can experience a kind of joy in the fact of our honoring one another in a way that distinguishes us.”

These past few years I’ve been reading more political and history non-fiction than usual, in an attempt to better understand the political divisiveness in our country. How we got here. Why Republicans and Democrats can’t seem to agree on anything. What we can do about it.

Twilight of Democracy: the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum is an illuminating new book–and more hopeful than the title might suggest. The author makes the point that once a country embraces a democratic form of government, there’s no guarantee it will last forever (dating back to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.) But if we want our democracies to last–if we believe in the main principles of justice, majority rule, equality among citizens–we need to understand how and why they fail.

Anne Applebaum is a respected historian, journalist and a Pulitzer-Prize winning author (for Gulag: A History, in 2004.) Although in Gulag she examines the Soviet prisoner labor camp system under Communism, here she explores the threat posed by the rise of authoritarian governments in the West (in Poland and Hungary, for starters.) “Far-Right governments,” she terms them. When a Far-Right government becomes too extreme, it moves towards Fascism: think Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain.

If you’ve read this far but stopped because you lean conservative and think this author sounds way too liberal, please keep reading. You’re in for a surprise.

Ms. Applebaum is an American with a personal and professional background that makes her well-suited to hold up a magnifying glass to these Far-Right governments. Born in Washington, D.C. and educated in the U.S. through college, she crossed the Atlantic to earn a Masters in International Relations at the London School of Economics. A few years later, in 1988, she moved to Warsaw as a correspondent for the Economist magazine. Poland became her second country after she married a Polish journalist and former war correspondent, a man appointed the Deputy Minister of National Defense for a center-right government in 1992.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, Anne and her husband threw a big party at a country house her husband’s family had bought ten years earlier. The guests included international journalists and a few diplomats, but most of the guests were Poles: friends and cousins, journalists, a few civil servants, a couple of junior members of the government. The mood was upbeat. The majority of the guests were conservatives, anti-communists, what Poles called “the Right.” They believed in democracy, the rule of law, in checks and balances, and in a Poland that was on its way to joining the European Union. Anne describes her own politics then and going forward along the lines of the Republican Party of John McCain (up until 2008 when he chose Sarah Palin as his Presidential running mate.) At the time, her husband was the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in the center-right government.

Nearly twenty years later, she recounts, she would now cross the street to avoid many of the people at that party. They, in turn, would be embarrassed to admit they’d even been at that party. “The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide.”

This election season I noticed a political sign in a neighborhood yard that says: No Socialism 2020. Don’t Go Left. That suggests the homeowners believe the Democratic candidates for President/VP are running on a Socialist platform. They’re not. Why do the homeowners think that? The other question raised by a sign like that: how far Right are some Americans willing to go? If we look at the extremes, as Ms. Applebaum’s book does: Socialism and a Far-Right ideology are different sides of the same coin. As are Communism and Fascism. The rule of law and a system of checks and balances get lost in the spin of both these ideologies. Toss the coin, and regardless of whether it lands on the C-side or the F-side, we’re looking at state-controlled (propaganda) media, cronyism, and loyalty-above-truth to the Party or Autocrat.

This is what happened in Poland, Ms. Applebaum explains in her book. Poland has both a President and a Prime Minister. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is neither at the moment, but he’s the 71-year-old leader and co-founder of the populist Law and Justice Party currently in power, and he’s a former Prime Minister. The party had previously been in power, briefly running the government from 2005-07 and occupying the Presidency from 2005-10 as a center-right government. But in the years it was out of power, the party’s ideology became more extreme. Many voters didn’t realize how much. Law and Justice ran a moderate campaign and won by a slim margin in 2015 against a center-right party that had been in power for eight years. Ms. Applebaum says it was headed by a weak, unimpressive Prime Minister, and it was understandable Poles wanted a change. What they got was radicalism. The new Law and Justice government did the following:

*Improperly appointed new judges to the constitutional court *Fired thousands of civil servants and replaced them with party hacks *Took over the state public broadcaster and replaced experienced reporters with far-Right personalities from online media *Fired Generals with years of expensive training in Western academies *Fired experienced diplomats *Wrecked cultural institutions (like museums) by replacing internationally respected heads with inexperienced unknowns

And the list goes on. The government promoted xenophobia. It curtailed public debate about the Holocaust “after two decades of profound Polish-Jewish conversations and reconciliation.” The international community was shocked, and the government eventually changed the law due to American pressure. More recently it has aggressively promoted anti-LGBTQ views, and the Polish Catholic Church (which used to be apolitical) has joined in.

How does this happen? How do voters think they’re voting for one kind of government and end up with another that’s so extreme? It’s not a simple answer, but the author tries to explain the complexities.

Demagogues and/or authoritarians don’t win on their own. They need writers and bloggers and spin doctors and TV programs to sell what they stand for to the public. They need media people and online forums to give voice to grievances and to channel anger and fears. Ask any historian and they’ll tell you the wheels of democracy turn slowly. But in Poland, for example, the new-Right doesn’t want slow. “These are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions.” For them, the end justifies the means. Truth is a luxury that’s not so important.

What drives influencers to support an autocratic leader? Some want power or fame. Some are extremely religious. Some want chaos so they can impose a new order. Some are motivated by fear or a deep desire for a national unity that’s conformist.

That’s Poland, from the viewpoint of the author. What’s going on in Hungary is similar. Ms. Applebaum also examines trends in England under Prime Minister Boris Johnson and in the United States under President Trump. The point is democracies are fragile. They need nurturing. They need a center-right and a center-left that can find ways to agree or compromise on important issues. To keep the country going, better and brighter, for future generations. That’s the kind of democracy I want to live in. Whatever your politics, I imagine most of you do, too.

Italian author Elena Ferrante, internationally famous for her Naples-based “Neopolitan Quartet” of novels, is recently out with the novel The Lying Life of Adults, her first in five years. To read it is to escape to another time and place ( early 1990s; Naples) and the mind of an adolescent girl.

GiovannaTrada has just turned sixteen when she tell us, at the opening of the story:

Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.

If you’re wondering if the father’s leaving is connected to what he said, it is. But not in the ways you might think.

As the only child of comfortably middle-class parents–high school teachers and intellectuals–Giovanna was smart and pretty as a little girl, and much adored by her father. But at twelve, with all the changes adolescence brings, she’s feeling awkward about her body and struggling in school. Her father’s remark sends her into a head-spin. She wasn’t meant to overhear it, but there’s nothing her parents can say to reassure her. The only way she can make sense of it is to go see Aunt Vittoria for herself.

What we soon learn, despite what Giovanna told us at the beginning, is that her father actually said, “She’s getting the face of Vittoria.” Vittoria is a name that looms large in Giovanna’s mind. Her father has had nothing to do with his sister in many years, and Giovanna has no memories of her aunt. Her father (or possibly her mother) has even blacked out Vittoria’s face from every old photo in their house. “Vittoria was like the name of a monstrous being who taints and infects anyone who touches her.”

Much to her surprise, her father allows her to go see her aunt and drives her there himself. They live in the heights, but to see Vittoria, they have to go into the “depths of the depths of Naples.” Vittoria still lives in the apartment where she and the father grew up, in the Industrial Zone. On a map, it’s the color of scorched earth. Vittoria is everything her parents have described–vulgar and spiteful and larger-than-life–but she’s also surprisingly beautiful.

So begins the on-again, off-again relationship between Giovanna and her aunt, who works as a maid and left school in the fifth grade. Giovanna learns her father was once an adored older brother, until he destroyed the great love of Vittoria’s life–a married man with three children. Vittoria tells Giovanna that she needs to watch her parents closely, that they are not what they seem. When she takes this advice, she does see something unusual. But it’s not quite what it seems.

Right now, in 2020 in the world of covid, we seem to be living in the Age of Mendacity, where truth is elusive, in part because so many people of influence dispute science and argue over the facts. In that sense, it’s a pleasure to get lost in a novel that takes place near the end of the last century, where the lies Giovanna is living with are strictly within the family. Or among close relations. Adolescence is fraught with messy conflict, but the adult author (Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym) captures it magnificently. Giovanna is a memorable character, as are her parents and Vittoria and others in her expanding orbit.

The novel ends abruptly (a little too abruptly?) but it’s the kind of ending that keeps you wondering what kind of adult Giovanna will become–or keep becoming. Nothing is static. The world keeps changing and so, apparently, must we.

“Let’s face it,” says the playwright John Patrick Shanley at the end of the podcast of his play Tennessee, “All of our attention spans were shattered long ago, and these little bits of things are easier.”

Easier for us to find time for, but no less profound for the brevity. And it’s free. Free and profound, what could be nicer in this age of Covid?

The play clocks in at 15 minutes, and the two actors (pictured above) are stellar. Even though it’s audio-only, I feel present, like I’m sitting in a Broadway theatre with my eyes closed.

The year is 2012, and we’re at an outdoor cafe in Mt. Juliet, a small town outside Nashville, Tennessee. Mike enters with a guitar slung over his shoulder, looking to speak to the young woman sitting alone at a table. Mike’s twenty and has just dropped out of college. He’s heard that Dewey can predict the future, and he wants her to tell him his. He’s also heard she’s a lesbian, but that’s just a rumor started by her ex-husband after she walked out, and it’s cost her the only job she ever loved–teaching piano. Dewey doesn’t want Mike to sit in the empty chair across from her. She tells him she’s saving it for “the opposition.” But Mike is persistent. When Dewey tells him things about himself that she couldn’t reasonably know, he keeps after her until she tells him his future. It’s a dark portrait that really upsets him, but the play doesn’t end there.

The discussion that follows the performance is with the playwright, the two actors, and podcast host Claudia Catania, and it’s as fun and thought-provoking as the play itself. Total time invested, including the play: 22 minutes.

“The Opposition,” as Dewey eventually tells Mike, is love. But the playwright explains afterwards that he was talking about “love” in the broader sense, not just romantic love. “There’s a way of looking at the world where you just sort of think of everybody and everything as an extension of yourself. And there’s another way of experiencing life where other sensibilities hit you and change you. And I guess I call that the opposition sometimes, and other times I call it company.” Shanley goes on to say he goes through fairly long periods where he doesn’t feel like he has any company. He feels like he never enters a place with the person across from him where their spirits interact in a way that changes them both and moves them forward.

Did you know John Patrick Shanley posts poems on Facebook? It comes up in the discussion. In the play, Mike’s just read a poem Dewey’s posted on Facebook. “A waterfall is a river broken in two.” He’s not sure what it means but says it has nothing to do with anything he hates and he hates a lot of things. Posting the poem, Dewey says, is her answer to loneliness. For Shanley himself, though, “To have another forum, especially one that’s free, is appealing to me. And the constant pressure to come up with something is good for me.”

As for the very short plays he often writes, he jokes that they’ve made him very wealthy. The serious reason is that they’re “test wells to see where the oil is.” His Broadway play Outside Mullingar started out that way, but then he realized he had a lot more he wanted to say. (A middle-aged man and woman, neighbors in rural Ireland, manage to find love despite different dispositions, a grudge dating back to grade school, and a land dispute between their parents.) I saw the play at a regional theatre in Dallas, pre-Covid, and loved it.

It’s fair to say John Patrick Shanley is living the American Dream. He grew up in the Bronx with a meat-packer Dad and a telephone operator Mom. He was put on academic probation his first year at NYU, but he returned there after serving stateside in the Marines during the Vietnam War. He graduated as the Valedictorian of his class. Today his resume includes 25+ plays, a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony win in 2005 for Doubt: A Parable (later made into a memorable movie with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Amy Adams.) He also won an Oscar in 1988 for Best Original Screenplay for Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. (Still great–I watched it not long ago on Turner Classic Movies)

To listen to this particular podcast or other theatre freebies, check out PlayingOnAir.com.

While talking about one of the themes in Tennessee, Shanley says, “Knowing the future doesn’t save you from anything because we are irrational creatures. . . Marriage falls under that egis and so do elections.” Tennessee was recorded in January 2018, and the tumultuous Presidential election was still very much on his mind more than a year later. He said he was waiting for the dust to settle so we can have a coherent discussion and find a way forward that is healthy for society.

And now the next election is mere months away. Whatever our differences, don’t most of us want to live in a healthy society?

This Fire Tower sits at the top of a mountain trail in the Adirondacks. It’s no longer in use, except for hikers seeking exceptional views from up high–or for goal-oriented adventurers aiming to complete the “Fire Tower Challenge.” The challenge originated back in 2001, the brain child of a chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club: a hiker has to climb at least 23 towers to qualify for the full-color patch. (Officially these Fire Towers are off limits to climbers during the pandemic, in order to promote social distancing.)

Reading up on the history of these Fire Towers fills me with nostalgia for simpler times. It feels good to read about a big problem that was solved with common sense. Up here in the mountains, fires were a big problem at the turn of the last century, sparked by the clear-cutting of forest trees and train engines criss-crossing the region. Almost one million acres of Adirondack forest were destroyed by two big fires in 1903 and 1908, and the following year the NY legislature tackled the problem with money and an idea: Forest Rangers and Company to the rescue! The first Fire Towers were built in 1909. Paid Fire Spotters manned the observation platforms at the top of the towers, each equipped with a circular map of the Adirondacks, a pointer tool to identify where the smoke was coming from, and a telephone to sound the alarm. Eventually over 100 Fire Towers were built, the majority in the Adirondacks, and many in the Catskills. My aunt, who settled in a small town up here as a young bride, remembers a Fire Spotter who kissed his wife goodbye every Monday morning, hiked up a nearby mountain to the Fire Tower, and settled in until Friday evening when he returned home. He was about 65 at the time and had been doing it for years.

By the 1970s, the Towers were on the wane. Spotting fires from aircraft was easier and more cost effective. The last of the Towers officially closed in 1990, but before the state could tear them all down, a group of local citizens intervened. They liked their Fire Towers. They liked to picnic there; they liked to climb them. Today 34 remain.

Up here in the Adirondacks I’m early to rise and early to bed, pleasantly exhausted from a day filled with so much fresh air and outdoor activity. Sometimes too sleepy to read, I discover the joys of The New Yorker fiction podcasts: a well-known author reads a favorite short story by another author and then discusses it with the magazine’s fiction editor. So far I’ve listened to four ‘bedtime stories’ and enjoyed them all, especially “Corrie,” written by Alice Munro and read by Margaret Atwood. Ms. Atwood’s voice was already familiar to me. Last fall I heard her speak in Dallas when she came to talk about her latest novel, The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m already nostalgic about last fall–last fall, for goodness sake!–if only because it was pre-covid. The podcast was pre-covid as well, recorded in August 2019.

“Corrie” opens in the mid-1950s, a time many Americans feel nostalgia for, and although the story is set in Alice Munro’s native Canada, small towns are like many small towns everywhere. There’s a social hierarchy. Most jobs come from one or two sources, like a mine or a factory. In the case of this story, there’s only one big employer in town, a men’s boot and work shoe factory owned by Mr. Carleton, a widower with one daughter. The story begins:

“It isn’t a good thing to have the money concentrated all in the one family the way you do in a place like this,” said Mr. Carleton. “I mean for a girl like my daughter Corrie here, for example, I mean like her, it isn’t good. Nobody on the same level.” Corrie was right across the table, looking their guest in the eye. She seemed to think this was funny.

Howard Ritchie doesn’t seem to think this is funny. Although only a few years older, his first impression of 26-year-old Corrie is that she’s a “spoiled rich miss. Unmannerly.” Mr. Carleton has hired the young city architect to restore the crumbling tower of the local Anglican church, not that Carleton is an Anglican. He’s a Methodist to the core. But he’s worried that the Irish Protestants that make up the Anglican church won’t do the job properly. They’re too poor; he’s the only one in town with any money. If he thought Howard might be a match for his daughter, he quickly finds out that the architect is “already equipped with a wife and young family.”

Nevertheless, Corrie and Howard embark on a long-term affair. Not right away, but after she returns from a trip to Egypt, having sent him a few silly postcards along the way. Now, though, her father has suffered a stroke and dies shortly thereafter. Corrie, for all her spunk, isn’t much good around the big house. She can’t cook or type or keep the fires going, but Howard is capable and helpful when he comes to visit. The fact that Corrie’s also lame in one leg–from the polio she got as a child–seems to make her more attractive to Howard, as ‘wounded maidens’ sometimes are.

There’s never talk of Howard leaving his wife, but soon there’s a complication: a young woman who used to do some housekeeping for Corrie wants money for not telling Howard’s wife about the affair. She wants it paid twice a year in cash to a P.O. Box; it’s not a large sum of money, for someone like Corrie, and she decides she should be the one to pay it. The affair continues happily as before, although changes come to the town. The factory is sold; the company that bought it closes it down. Corrie finds new ways to keep herself busy. But then there’s a twist. We should have seen it coming, but we don’t. (At least this reader didn’t.) It’s just a wonderful piece of writing and plotting. It’s the kind of story that keeps the reader (or the listener) thinking about the characters long afterwards.

Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are both Canadians, and they know each other fairly well, having met shortly after their first books were published. Ms. Monro, now 89, announced she was retiring from writing in 2013, the same year she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was little known in the U.S. until The New Yorker started publishing her short stories in 1977, something I learned in the discussion afterwards. “Corrie” was a more recent story, published ten years ago when she was 79 (way to go, Alice!) When fiction editor Deborah Treisman asks Ms. Atwood if she thinks they were working in similar zones, Atwood says absolutely not, Alice was a Depression baby, born in 1931, and Margaret was a War baby, born in 1939. Only eight years apart, but a different world and mindset. It makes me think of all the writers who died before the current pandemic, and how all the writers still writing will be changed by having lived in the time of covid.

The film opens with a photographic piecing together of Toni’s face at different stages of her adult life, a decoupage that changes as she grows older. Toni’s voice is the backdrop. “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

Later, looking through my old copy of the novel Beloved, for which Toni won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, I discover those same words in its final pages, and they’re spoken by Paul D about Sethe. It’s a beautiful thing for a man to say about a woman. It’s a beautiful thing for anyone to say about another person, particularly when that person is regarded as an abomination by most everyone else.

The great Toni Morrison died last August at the age of eighty-eight, but this documentary about her life and work was released only a few months before that, in June 2019. Recently it was offered to me as part of a streaming bundle, after the civil protests started that were sparked by the murder of George Floyd. It’s a very different film than I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO, discussed in my previous blog. Toni Morrison changed the literary landscape in this country by adding to the canon with her unforgettable narratives about African-Americans. If the extent of her impact wasn’t clear to me before, it is now through this film. As Robert Gottlieb, her long-time editor at Knopf, says, Beloved was a big event. “It crystallized the past for African-Americans. I don’t think of it as a work of history. I think of it as a work through which, if we choose, we can look at our history.”

Part of the film is an extended interview that takes place at her home overlooking a river. She speaks directly to the camera. She’s serene and wise, serious but quick to laugh, a natural-born storyteller both on and off the page. We also hear from her contemporaries: writers and poets, literature professors, critics and book editors, and Oprah Winfrey (who produced and starred in the film version of Beloved); there’s footage of her accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in Sweden in 1993, and from interviews with Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose, and of her long career at Random House, where she was the first female African-American editor in the company’s history.

It was while working at Random House that she wrote and published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. Toni was thirty-nine, but it was a childhood memory that sparked the idea for the story. Toni grew up in Lorain, OH, a steel town on the shore of Lake Erie. It was, she says, very mixed in terms of race and culture, mostly a poor labor class with very few middle class people. One day Toni and an 11-year-old friend were arguing about the existence of God. Toni believed, but her friend didn’t because she’d been praying for blue eyes for two years and hadn’t gotten them. Astonished, Toni looked at the girl, who was “very very black and very very beautiful.” Later, processing this as an adult, she asked herself, How does a child learn self-loathing? She set about answering the question by writing the book she wanted to read. In an interview with Bill Moyers, she talks about the “master narrative” and explains. “Whatever ideological script is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. . .It has a certain POV [point of view]. When these little girls see that the most prized gift they can get at Christmastime is that little white doll, that’s the master narrative speaking. ‘This is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it.'”

One day years later Toni was sitting at her desk at home looking out at the river when she saw a woman walk out of the water fully dressed, wearing a hat. The woman sat down on the shoreline in front of her house. Toni looked at her, but the woman never looked back and then she got up and disappeared. That’s when the author realized it was the solution to a story she was writing about a dead girl called Beloved. The book was her fifth novel, and the seed of the idea was a newspaper clipping she’d seen while editing a book for Random House. Back in the 1850s, Margaret Garner, a young mother and a slave, crossed the Ohio River with her husband to freedom, with help from the Underground Railroad. She was later recaptured, but she slit the throat of her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. At her trial, the prosecution had to decide whether to try her for murder or the destruction of personal property. The conundrum: if they tried her for murder, it would mean admitting she was a human being. In Toni’s creative mind, only the daughter could rightly decide the mother’s fate.

Toni’s grandparents were sharecroppers in Alabama, but they moved north during the Great Migration. Toni’s older sister taught her to read when she was three, and the future author went to the East Coast for college, in part to escape the prying eyes of her strict parents. She attended Howard University in D.C. and later taught there after getting a Masters at Cornell in American literature. While teaching at Howard, she married an architect and had two sons, but they divorced when he seemed to want a traditional 1950s-type wife. The single mother edited books, wrote books and taught books at universities including Rutgers, SUNY-Albany, Yale, and Princeton. Along the way, some of the books she wrote were banned in schools (and at least one prison) and the news that she’d won the Nobel Prize was reported in The Washington Post in an article that quoted three male authors who were not happy with her win. They said things like, Beloved was a fraud; it was a fake version of the slave trade. Her win was a triumph of political correctness.

Early in her career she was praised for her talent, but criticized for her subject matter.

“When Sula came out, the early reviews, even among liberals, said things like, ‘She has a great talent. One day she won’t limit it to writing about black people. No one says that when Irish writers write about the Irish.'” Farah Griffin, Columbia University professor, in the film

About that Toni said, “I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.” About Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (which we read in my high school) she said, “Invisible to whom?” It’s not that she didn’t want white people to read her books. She hoped everyone would read them. But guess what? she says. “There’s a whole other world going on where they are not even looking.” The novelist Walter Mosley describes her work as “Shakespearean but pedestrian.” Like Shakespeare, Toni was writing about epic battles but ones that didn’t involve Kings and VIPs–just ordinary people.

The river setting at Toni’s house in the film is beautiful, but the location was undisclosed. Later I found out she lived in a little town north of NYC called Grand View-on-Hudson. I grew up in a town on the other side of the Hudson River, almost directly across the water! I wished it were more of a connection, but more importantly, I wondered why I hadn’t read more of her books after reading and loving Beloved. So I started with her first.

In the film, Toni says, “I started my career by putting my entire plot on the first page. So the reader reads the first page; he knows exactly what happened. And if he turns the page, it’s because he wants to find out how it happened or he loves the language.” I read the first page of The Bluest Eye and when I turned the page, it was because I had to find out how it happened. And because I loved the language.

As our country grapples with the racial wounds exposed by the killing of George Floyd by a white policeman, the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, is back for an encore performance in streaming venues–an extraordinary film that meets the moment. James Baldwin is one of the greats in American literature. When he died from stomach cancer in 1987, he was only sixty-three, and yet he’d managed to live far longer than his three friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The film begins with a letter to his literary agent in the summer of 1979. James had begun working on a book about the lives and deaths of the three men, and the filmmaker uses Baldwin’s notes from his unwritten manuscript as a starting point to explore the writer’s observations about racism in America, which are interwoven with film footage and images from the Civil Rights movement and beyond, to Watts and Oakland and Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and more.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

The Civil Rights movement is what brought Baldwin back to the U.S. Not permanently, but long enough to bear witness. In 1948, at age twenty-four, he moved to France to escape the racism he’d experienced throughout his young life. Nine years later he was an established writer, but he did not miss the country where he was born.

One day on the streets of Paris a photograph calls out to Baldwin from the newsstand. A 15-year-old black girl, Dorothy Counts, is making her way to the entrance of a high school in Charlotte, NC, surrounded by a mob of angry white students. “It filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed,” he says. “Some one of us should have been there with her.” Later, back in America, an eye witness tells Baldwin, “Spit was hanging from the hem of Dorothy’s dress.” The year was 1957, and some states were having a hard time accepting the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision on Brown vs. the Board of Education. That same year in Little Rock, AR, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to escort nine black students to a white public school amid violent protests. Staring calmly into a news camera, one white woman says, “God forgives murder and adultery, but he is very angry and actually curses all who integrate.”

To watch this film is to immerse yourself in the distinctive and very urbane presence of James Baldwin. There is footage from his lectures at universities in the States and in England; he is memorably interviewed by Dick Cavett on Dick’s celebrated talk show; he comments on the Hollywood films that influenced or frightened him, and he recalls exactly where he was when the news came that Medgar (in 1963) and Malcolm (in 1965) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (in 1968) had been shot and killed. The film is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson with words culled from James’s published and unpublished works. Jackson disappears into the role of James Baldwin. His words are eloquent but precise; searing but humane. These are the ones I can’t stop thinking about:

“The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”

“The Negro has never been as docile as white Americans wanted to believe. That was a myth. We were not singing and dancing down the levee. We were trying to keep alive. We were trying to survive in a very brutal system.”

“The economy of the U.S. was built by black people. In the South, it was cotton. In the North, it was textiles.”

“History is not the past. It is the present. The world is not white. It cannot be white–it never was. White is a metaphor for power. It’s simply a way of describing the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

“When any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a black man says the exact same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him.”

“Apathy and ignorance. . . That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t want to know.”

“No other country has been so fat, so sleek, so safe, so happy, so irresponsible, and so dead. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence and the children growing up safely to go to college and become executives and then to marry and have the Plymouth and the house and so forth. A great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it and do not know that when we talk about democracy, this is what we mean.”

Listening to James Baldwin speak, one might think he was educated at a place like Yale or Cambridge. He was not. Born in Harlem to a single mother, he distinguished himself at his public high school but put off the idea of college to help support his brothers and sisters. When James was three, his mother had married a Baptist minister, but his stepfather died on the same day she gave birth to her ninth child, a year after James graduated from high school. He credits a young white school teacher as the reason he was unable to hate whites. She talked to him–a boy of ten–about books and the world. She took him to films and to the theatre, a world he never would have seen but for her. About his decision to leave his own country, he said, “In America I was free only in battle, never free to rest. And he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.”

What killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 was a policeman’s knee pinning his neck to the ground for almost nine minutes. In the film, Baldwin talks about a May 1963 meeting that attorney general Bobby Kennedy asked him to set up with some prominent Negroes. Lorraine Hansberry was there. Bobby was thirty-eight. Lorraine was only thirty-three (she would die from cancer at thirty-four) but she was the first black playwright and youngest American to win a N.Y. Critics’ Circle Award for her Broadway play A Raisin in the Sun. Earlier that month there had been a march for freedom in Birmingham, AL, the most segregated city in the south. At the end of the meeting Lorraine said to Bobby, “We would like from you a moral commitment. I am very worried about the state of the civilization which produced the photo of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.”

Dorothy Counts, the school girl who made headlines, still lives in Charlotte. Her parents withdrew her from the school after only a few days for her own safety, and they sent her to Philadelphia to live with an aunt and finish high school. In 2010, however, the same Charlotte high school that scorned Dorothy named a library after her. Last year students invited her back to honor her with a bench with her name on it placed outside the entrance to the school. This time students cheered her name.

The filmmaker, Raoul Peck, said he was introduced to James Baldwin at the age of seventeen, just before he started college in Berlin. Peck was born in Haiti, but two black American friends in Germany urged him to read The Fire Next Time, a book of two essays: one about his early life in Harlem; the other an impassioned plea against racial injustice. “It changed my life,” said Peck. Many years later when he began working on the documentary, he was given access to all of Baldwin’s work by his estate, which is managed by James’s sister. In a talk Peck gave at Lincoln Center in NY (which I watched on YouTube) after the Oscar nomination, he said, “As a filmmaker, you need to tell a story so that the film is still relevant in fifty years.” Peck went looking for the book Baldwin had intended to write. He had thirty pages of notes and a title, Remember This House, but no manuscript. This film is his vision of the story Baldwin might have told if he were alive today.

A lifetime ago–in January, pre-Covid pandemic–I read a book review about a novel called Abigail, first published in the author’s native Hungary in 1970, but only now brought to us in English by the New York Review Books. Hungarians ranked it 6th on their list of 100 favorite books of all time, which included the likes of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Lord of the Rings. Of all Magda Szabo’s critically acclaimed books, Abigail is the most beloved in Hungary. Today, having read the novel during the U.S. lockdown–a continent away and fifty years after it was first published–I too am a fan. And something more.

In the fall of 1943, fourteen-year-old Gina Vitay is sent to boarding school in the village of Arkod, far removed from her home in Budapest. Her life is nothing like Harry Potter’s in that she’s not an orphan living with a dreadful family like the Dursleys. Gina is the only child and beloved daughter of a widower who’s a General in the Hungarian army. However, as with Harry Potter, certain people may wish to abduct Gina or have her killed. She knows nothing of this at the start; rather, she assumes her father wishes to remarry and that his future wife wants Gina out of the way.

After a long day’s journey, the General leaves Gina at the Bishop Matula Academy, warning her to tell no one in Budapest where she is. The Academy is like a fortress: gaining entrance or escape is almost impossible. To her horror, Gina finds it an oppressively pious girls’ school where strict conformity is the rule. Uniforms, hairstyles, the supervised weekly phone calls with her father in which she’s not allowed to whisper a word of discontent. Adolescents being what they are, the girls in Gina’s class find small ways to rebel (one in particular is hilarious) but Gina thinks their defiant antics are juvenile. As for the mythic Abigail, the statue in the school garden, Gina scoffs at the girls’ claim that Abigail comes to the aid of anyone who needs her, simply by placing a handwritten plea in the statue’s urn. But as the days grind into endless weeks–after Gina has betrayed and alienated her peers and attempted to run away–she begins to wonder if there’s a real person “hiding” behind Abigail, a real person ready to help someone in dire need.

Meanwhile, in the village of Arkod, a political dissident is posting anti-Nazi messages in public spaces, a dangerous activity in a country that is one of the Axis powers supporting Germany. Gina’s father visits her to confide he’s part of the resistance that’s tried to make a deal with the Allied powers, angering Hitler. He tells her there is nothing left but to try to save as many people as can be saved, before the Germans invade. When Abigail provides Gina with forged documents that could protect some of her Jewish classmates, Gina realizes the person “hiding” behind the statue and the town revolutionary may be one and the same.

Don’t let the fact that Gina is fourteen dissuade you from picking up this novel. If anything, it might be best appreciated by older readers. The adult characters–the General, the teachers, the director, a former student–are complex. Some of them are not what they seem, and the story becomes increasingly suspenseful with every turn of the page. Beautifully written and plotted, it’s a literary mystery that transcends the genre.

Along with Gina, it’s impossible not to bridle at the Academy’s inflexible rules and restrictions, and yet you realize it’s the safest place she could possibly be. Like sheltering in place during our current pandemic. It won’t last forever, but maybe just long enough to give her (and you and me and our fellow Americans) a better chance to live out our lives.

Abigail made me a fan of author Magda Szabo, but it also made me want to circle more of the globe through literature. To quote Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the places you’ll go!”

The novel’s English translator had this to say about Hungary’s part in WWII:

“The Hungarian people then, for all their political misadventures, were and are not so very different from ourselves. They too have been a centre of high European civilisation and have contributed much to our common culture. It is only by accidents of place and history that we in the West were spared the horrors they endured, and we need to know far more than we currently do about them; if only to understand our own lives and place in the world better.” Len Rix, the translator of Abigail, in a January interview with Hungarian Literature Online