To win one of five copies of Lesley Downer's The Shogun's Queen, just answer the question in the Comments below:
"As a woman, in what period of history would you have most liked to live in Japan and why?"
Then also send your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk, so that I can contact you if you win.
Closing date 7th December
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Good luck!
Wednesday, 30 November 2016
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
The Shogun's Harem by Lesley Downer
Our November Guest is Lesley Downer, who will become a regular History Girl next year.
Lesley Downer lived in Japan for many years. She tramped around Basho’s
Narrow Road the Deep North, lived among geisha, interviewed sumo
wrestlers and enjoyed the glitzy life of Tokyo. She is the author of
many books on Japan, including Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing
World, Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West and The Last
Concubine, short listed for Romantic Novel of the Year. Her new novel,
The Shogun’s Queen, takes place largely in the Women’s Palace.
Lesey is currently a visiting lecturer, teaching on the MA programme in Creative Writing (non-fiction ) at City University in London and lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I. Miller.
www.lesleydowner.com
Unravelling the web of secrecy around The Shogun’s ‘Harem’
The heroine of The Shogun’s Queen really lived. In a way she was a bit like Princess Diana. She started life as a commoner, in fact very minor nobility, much like Diana, and grew up in relative freedom. Then, when she was 17, like Diana she was chosen to marry the ruler of the country - not the ruler-in-waiting, like Prince Charles, but the actual ruler, the shogun. Like Charles, this ruler didn’t actually wield much power at all. He had a whole government that did the ruling.
Traditionally the shogun would have been married to an imperial princess, a member of the emperor's family. (The emperor was a Pope-like figure who lived in seclusion in Kyoto while the shogun, who lived in Edo, now Tokyo, was the temporal ruler.) Imperial princesses were used to a life within walls. They were born and grew up in their palaces and never left, in the same way that our queen can’t just go to the shops like an ordinary person. It’s said that one emperor once climbed to the top of the topmost tower in his palace to take a look at the world outside.
When she married the shogun the imperial princess would have stepped into a palanquin and left her palace for the first time. She would have had her only glimpse of the big wide world through the slats of her window as she was carried the 450 kilometres to Edo.
But for commoners like my heroine, Atsu, life was quite different. In Japan in those days the lower you were on the social scale the freer you were. In the mid nineteenth century a peasant woman named Matsue Taseko, who happened to be a poet, informed her husband she was off to Kyoto and walked through the mountains alone. There she hung out with lords, ladies, poets and even the women of the Emperor’s court and wrote poetry. Later she went to Edo. Sometimes her husband went with her, sometimes not. He raised no objections to her independent lifestyle.
For Atsu it must have been thrilling beyond imagination to be taken to live in Edo Castle - but she would also have soon discovered that there was no way out. Once you were in, you didn’t come out.
Edo Castle was Japan’s Versailles. It was as magnificent and lavish as Kublai Khan’s fabled Xanadu. A vast complex of palaces and gardens a mile across and four miles in circumference, it was where the shogun lived and, with the help of an army of government officials, ruled the country. On maps its exact location was never marked. It was always hidden behind the coat of arms of the shoguns, the ruling Tokugawa family - three hollyhock leaves in a circle. It was a place of spectacular wealth and power and glitz and glory.
The holy of holies, the innermost sanctum within that complex, was the Women’s Palace, the ooku - Great Interior.
The white-walled buildings with their dove-grey tiled roofs were surrounded by landscaped pleasure gardens, threaded with streams and lakes where women glided in red-lacquered barges. There were moon-viewing pavilions, stages for Noh plays, tea ceremony huts and artificial hills, of which Momijiyama - Maple Mountain - was most renowned for its beauty.
Inside there was a labyrinth of chambers with sliding painted screens for walls, coffered ceilings glimmering with gold leaf and floors of fragrant rice straw tatami mats. The women had an endless supply of tasteful yet hugely expensive kimonos. The shogun’s wife changed five times a day. They were surrounded by gorgeous artefacts, perfumes and incense, lacquered chests and shelves, priceless tea ceremony ware and exquisite vases. They were constantly given gifts by petitioners hoping they might intercede with the shogun on their behalf. They were surrounded by beauty; and these treasures have been preserved and are in the Tokugawa museums so we can glimpse their lives from these.
In museum catalogues they are always presented solely as works of art, treasures, and sometimes it’s mentioned that they belonged to ‘the shogun’s household’.
What is not mentioned is that that household consisted entirely of women and that the shogun was the only man who could ever enter. In the Forbidden City in Peking and in the Topkapi Palace, the sultan’s harem in Istanbul, there were eunuchs. But the Japanese never had the custom of castration. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of doing something so traumatic to a man. In the Women’s Palace shaven-headed ‘companion priests’ - effectively nuns - took the place of eunuchs and were the only women allowed to cross between the men’s and the women’s palaces.
So the treasures remain. But as for the life that went on around them, there is very little information. For the palace was shrouded in secrecy. No westerner ever visited or heard the tiniest whisper of it or even knew it existed. The women took an oath never to tell of anything that went on there and even after the palace closed down for good in 1868 and they were thrown out into the cold very few ever revealed anything about their lives.
In the 1890s the son of one ex-lady-in-waiting published a book called Mother’s Stories of the Castle and scholars at Tokyo University interviewed two women who had served there. Recently a couple of scholarly works have been published in English, unearthing as much as can be found on life in the palace.
From their information the interviewers put together plans of the palace. There were the shogun’s apartments (known as the Little Sitting Room, though they were far from small), the wing where the shogun’s wife lived and another wing in a different part of the palace where his mother lived. Then there were offices where women officials carried out day-to-day administration, and - by far the largest area - the private chambers of the ladies and their maids. In all there were well over four hundred rooms. Only the highest-ranking ladies and the mothers of the shogun’s children had their own rooms. The rest shared. All the ladies slept surrounded by maids, ready to serve them when required. Only people of no consequence slept alone.
There were also great halls, reception rooms, shrine rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, and huge baths with areas for reclining. On the opposite side of the palace from the shogun’s entrance was a heavily-guarded gate which led to a bridge across the moat. Here the women came and went on the few occasions when they were allowed to go out and merchants brought silks, make up and other goods to sell.
It was a place of unimaginable luxury but also a place of great unhappiness. There was plotting, intrigue, jealousy, whispers behind hands, women ganging up on each other, even murders and - it was said - hauntings. Bodies were found down wells, boy babies were smothered at birth on the orders of women who wanted to ensure that their son, not someone else’s, became the next shogun. A striking number of boy children - most, in fact - died at birth or in infancy.
The shogun only chose a few girls as his concubines - Ienari had 53 children by 27 concubines - but all the rest had to remain virgins. Once in the 1840s the finance minister was trying to enforce austerity measures and asked the women to cut back on buying expensive kimonos. He was told in no uncertain terms by the formidable chief elder that the women suffered enough from their enforced celibacy and were entitled to as many gorgeous kimonos as they wanted in compensation.
All these women assumed life in the Castle would continue just the same for ever. Like us today, no one imagined that their world would come to an end. But in the 1860s the country erupted into civil war and in 1868 the palace was closed down and the women thrown out onto the streets. In the upheaval that followed people completely forgot that the Women’s Palace with all its luxury and beauty and backbiting and tragedy had ever existed. Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and all that remains of the Women’s Palace is the vast lawn of the East Gardens there.
 |
| Photo credit: Jill Shaw |
Lesey is currently a visiting lecturer, teaching on the MA programme in Creative Writing (non-fiction ) at City University in London and lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I. Miller.
www.lesleydowner.com
Unravelling the web of secrecy around The Shogun’s ‘Harem’
 |
| The shogun celebrating New Year's Day with his women (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912) |
Traditionally the shogun would have been married to an imperial princess, a member of the emperor's family. (The emperor was a Pope-like figure who lived in seclusion in Kyoto while the shogun, who lived in Edo, now Tokyo, was the temporal ruler.) Imperial princesses were used to a life within walls. They were born and grew up in their palaces and never left, in the same way that our queen can’t just go to the shops like an ordinary person. It’s said that one emperor once climbed to the top of the topmost tower in his palace to take a look at the world outside.
When she married the shogun the imperial princess would have stepped into a palanquin and left her palace for the first time. She would have had her only glimpse of the big wide world through the slats of her window as she was carried the 450 kilometres to Edo.
 |
| Gate that led to the Women's Palace in Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace Tokyo |
For Atsu it must have been thrilling beyond imagination to be taken to live in Edo Castle - but she would also have soon discovered that there was no way out. Once you were in, you didn’t come out.
Edo Castle was Japan’s Versailles. It was as magnificent and lavish as Kublai Khan’s fabled Xanadu. A vast complex of palaces and gardens a mile across and four miles in circumference, it was where the shogun lived and, with the help of an army of government officials, ruled the country. On maps its exact location was never marked. It was always hidden behind the coat of arms of the shoguns, the ruling Tokugawa family - three hollyhock leaves in a circle. It was a place of spectacular wealth and power and glitz and glory.
 |
| Gardens at Katsura Rikyu - akin to what the gardens in the Women’s Palace must have looked like |
The holy of holies, the innermost sanctum within that complex, was the Women’s Palace, the ooku - Great Interior.
The white-walled buildings with their dove-grey tiled roofs were surrounded by landscaped pleasure gardens, threaded with streams and lakes where women glided in red-lacquered barges. There were moon-viewing pavilions, stages for Noh plays, tea ceremony huts and artificial hills, of which Momijiyama - Maple Mountain - was most renowned for its beauty.
Inside there was a labyrinth of chambers with sliding painted screens for walls, coffered ceilings glimmering with gold leaf and floors of fragrant rice straw tatami mats. The women had an endless supply of tasteful yet hugely expensive kimonos. The shogun’s wife changed five times a day. They were surrounded by gorgeous artefacts, perfumes and incense, lacquered chests and shelves, priceless tea ceremony ware and exquisite vases. They were constantly given gifts by petitioners hoping they might intercede with the shogun on their behalf. They were surrounded by beauty; and these treasures have been preserved and are in the Tokugawa museums so we can glimpse their lives from these.
In museum catalogues they are always presented solely as works of art, treasures, and sometimes it’s mentioned that they belonged to ‘the shogun’s household’.
 |
| Gilded screens at Nagoya Castle - akin to what the Women’s Palace must have looked like |
So the treasures remain. But as for the life that went on around them, there is very little information. For the palace was shrouded in secrecy. No westerner ever visited or heard the tiniest whisper of it or even knew it existed. The women took an oath never to tell of anything that went on there and even after the palace closed down for good in 1868 and they were thrown out into the cold very few ever revealed anything about their lives.
In the 1890s the son of one ex-lady-in-waiting published a book called Mother’s Stories of the Castle and scholars at Tokyo University interviewed two women who had served there. Recently a couple of scholarly works have been published in English, unearthing as much as can be found on life in the palace.
From their information the interviewers put together plans of the palace. There were the shogun’s apartments (known as the Little Sitting Room, though they were far from small), the wing where the shogun’s wife lived and another wing in a different part of the palace where his mother lived. Then there were offices where women officials carried out day-to-day administration, and - by far the largest area - the private chambers of the ladies and their maids. In all there were well over four hundred rooms. Only the highest-ranking ladies and the mothers of the shogun’s children had their own rooms. The rest shared. All the ladies slept surrounded by maids, ready to serve them when required. Only people of no consequence slept alone.
 |
| Ladies of the Women’s Palace (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912) |
It was a place of unimaginable luxury but also a place of great unhappiness. There was plotting, intrigue, jealousy, whispers behind hands, women ganging up on each other, even murders and - it was said - hauntings. Bodies were found down wells, boy babies were smothered at birth on the orders of women who wanted to ensure that their son, not someone else’s, became the next shogun. A striking number of boy children - most, in fact - died at birth or in infancy.
The shogun only chose a few girls as his concubines - Ienari had 53 children by 27 concubines - but all the rest had to remain virgins. Once in the 1840s the finance minister was trying to enforce austerity measures and asked the women to cut back on buying expensive kimonos. He was told in no uncertain terms by the formidable chief elder that the women suffered enough from their enforced celibacy and were entitled to as many gorgeous kimonos as they wanted in compensation.
All these women assumed life in the Castle would continue just the same for ever. Like us today, no one imagined that their world would come to an end. But in the 1860s the country erupted into civil war and in 1868 the palace was closed down and the women thrown out onto the streets. In the upheaval that followed people completely forgot that the Women’s Palace with all its luxury and beauty and backbiting and tragedy had ever existed. Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and all that remains of the Women’s Palace is the vast lawn of the East Gardens there.
Monday, 28 November 2016
Wall to Wall by Julie Summers
I have just spent a magical, exhausting but immensely rewarding week as a tutor on an Arvon Foundation non-fiction course. As I write I am sitting up in bed in what used to be John Osborne's study at the Hurst, his home for the last years of his life. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever spent time in though I have scarcely been beyond the front door. The study is large and sparsely furnished. The only true reminder of his presence is his leather topped writing desk at which I have sat every morning and evening reading work submitted by the students. While I am no believer in ghosts or spirits, it certainly feels slightly unreal and mystical to be inhabiting the same space as the great man. I suspect that much else in the room has changed since his day and I am sure there was no green Exit sign with a running man and an arrow on the wall... But I digress.
The Arvon Foundation was set up by two poets, John Moat and John Fairfax, and Antoinette Moat who helped buy the first Arvon property, Totleigh Barton in Devon. The original aim was to provide time and space away from school for young people to write poetry. Today residential courses take place in one of three houses situated in remote rural locations in Devon, Shropshire and Yorkshire. Over the last almost fifty years it has helped countless writers to spend time honing or developing new skills or simply learning to come to terms with how they wish to express themselves, whether through poetry, prose, drama or non-fiction.
The recipe is simple: take up to sixteen people of mixed age, background, ability, ambition and sex. Shut them up in a remote house - in this case in the heart of Shropshire - with two tutors and plenty of food and see what happens. The structure of the course is up to the tutors but fits into a framework that has been well tried and tested: the mornings spent in a workshop and the afternoons writing or attending half hour tutorials with one or other of the tutors. It doesn't sound like hard work when written down but it is intense, let me tell you, especially from the tutor's point of view.
All meals are enjoyed together and the evening meal is prepared by the students, with washing up and table laying done in teams. Inevitably the table talk focuses on writing so in the event the only time you are not either thinking, talking about working on writing is when you are asleep. At least that was the case for me. Yet it was hugely enjoyable and something I would do again if I were asked.
While it would be out of order to name names, we have been lucky enough this week to work with a dozen fabulous writers who each has a major project they want to bring to a wider audience. Stirring tales from family history were predominant and I have enjoyed learning about the author, Charles Lee, who wrote down the Cornish language; a trio of women connected with the Garden City movement and bawdy women in history to name but three.
There is something energising about being with a group of people who are wholly focused on writing historical non-fiction. It reminds me of the immense richness and variety of possibilities there are to focus on an aspect of real life and bring it out in written form. I admire writers of fiction for their ability to conjure up worlds in their heads but I am equally in awe of writers who can corral and tidy up the messiness of life and show it to us in ways that make some sense, drawing strings together to weave a story that does more than just lay down facts, dates and names.
In one of our workshops we looked at the old chestnut: oral history. To write historical non-fiction is to some extent to be an eyewitness to history. Yet as anyone knows, to claim to have the only view on an historical event is to ignore the human mind's ability to process what it sees, hears, feels, smells and senses. I remember chairing a panel one this topic a few years ago at a literary festival and concluding that one person's view can differ so radically from another's that it is as if they had witnessed two different events.
We tried this out in a controlled experiment at Arvon this week. The results were nothing short of hilarious. On the evening prior to the exercise, so just over twelve hours earlier, four members of the group, including my fellow tutor, Ian Marchant, had performed a reading-with-actions of a fourhanded play written by Charles Lee and first performed in 1913. The resulting accounts from both players and audience were so diverse as to make me wonder whether we had all been in the same room together. The only thing that convinced me that we had was the overwhelming sense of place and atmosphere. That is something that often links people's experiences and - if they are unfortunate to suffer a bad or dangerous one - can form lifelong and exclusive closeness. I suspect in the case of our experience any allusion to the Revered Becksmith will just raise a broad grin of recognition.
I knew the experience of teaching on an Arvon course would be a good one but I had no idea beforehand just how rewarding it would be. I cannot remember enjoying the company of a dozen or so fellow writers as much as I have this week and I return to my desk and the second half of my book - now known thanks to my 'colleague' (as he always addressed me) Ian Watt as the Shitty First Draft.
If you ever fancy an indulgent sojourn with fellow writers, I cannot recommend an Arvon course highly enough, either as a tutor or a student. The staff at the centres are wonderful, supportive and unflappable and make the whole experience easy to enjoy. But it is the writers who make it special and memorable. It has reminded me of the joys and pitfalls of writing historical non-fiction and how the joys win every time.
Sunday, 27 November 2016
Anastasia Romanov and The Royal Ballet by Janie Hampton
Earlier this month I attended a performance of the Royal Ballet’s extraordinary production ‘Anastasia’. In gorgeous and arresting dance and music, events were portrayed surrounding the young Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov.
 |
| Grand Duchess Anastasia and her sisters on board the yacht Standart with Princess Viktoria of Shaumburg-Lippe, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, sister of the German Emperor Wilhelm II, ('Kaiser Bill') and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II |
 |
Little Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov on board the imperial yacht with his carer the sailor Nagorny. |
Act Two began with Anastasia’s coming-out ball. Amid much joyous dancing, Rasputin loomed menacingly, slithering between the Tsar and Tsarina. Vast chandeliers hung over the scene in a disconcerting un-perpendicular way, prompting the question – was what we were seeing real or imagined? Anastasia’s privileged life came to an abrupt end with the storming of the Winter Palace.
The music in these acts came from Tchaikovsky’s first and third symphonies, and the dance was classical in style.
 |
Act Two of Anastasia , Royal Ballet, 2016. C 2016 ROH, photo by Tristram Kenton.
|
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Natalia Osipova as Anna Anderson in Anastasia. C ROH 2016, photo by Tristram Kenton.
|
MacMillan's wonderful reworking of this story is a must-see for History Girls, illustrating vividly the complex psychodrama of a woman’s memory and identity. Catch it at the Royal Opera House or in a cinema near you.
References:
Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book -photographs from my camera, Daily Telegraph 1908.
Frances Welch, The False Grand Duchess Anastasia, Royal Ballet, 2016.
Saturday, 26 November 2016
Cinema as a compelling mirror, by Carol Drinkwater
A day or so ago I watched, for the first time in many years, Louis Malle's wonderful film, Lacombe, Lucien. I don't think I have seen it since it was first released in 1974, when I was a young actress living in London. I would have been audience at the Hampstead Everyman or that wonderful Academy 1 and 2 in Oxford Street. I cannot remember whether it was shown in French with English sub-titles or dubbed into English. Either way, I would not have appreciated the nuances of the regional accents particularly that of the young actor, Pierre Blaise, who played the titular role of Lucien, the seventeen-year-old farm boy. Blaise, who was picked from amongst amateurs by Malle, talks with a southern accent so strong that even now after thirty years of living in Provence I had some difficulty following lines of his dialogue. Think Geordie for foreigners.
Aurore Clement plays a young German Jewess hiding out with her father and grandmother in a remote rural corner of southern France. The family escaped from Germany to Paris. When the Germans marched in to the capital, they fled once more to the south where we find them in hiding. This well-trodden path in search of a safe base became the modus vivendi for many Jews who had originally arrived into Paris from Germany or Eastern Europe. Their safer tenures in the south were, for the majority, short-lived.
Aurore Clement plays a young German Jewess hiding out with her father and grandmother in a remote rural corner of southern France. The family escaped from Germany to Paris. When the Germans marched in to the capital, they fled once more to the south where we find them in hiding. This well-trodden path in search of a safe base became the modus vivendi for many Jews who had originally arrived into Paris from Germany or Eastern Europe. Their safer tenures in the south were, for the majority, short-lived.
At my original viewing of the film, I was bowled over by the extraordinary beauty of Aurore Clement whose photograph was then pinned to the wall of my attic bedroom in my rambling old flat in Kentish Town, where it stayed, I think, until I moved on from that address. But I feel sure now that the groundbreaking subject matter of the film was probably almost entirely lost on me.
Aurore Clement is now 71 (still beautiful from the pics I found on the internet). Pierre Blaise who was both mesmeric and a fine young actor was killed in a car crash in 1975 at the age of 20, the year after the film was released.
In 1973, when Malle was preparing this film, he already had eight successful features to his name. As well, as a younger filmmaker he had worked as co-director with Jacques Cousteau on the Academy-Award winning documentary, The Silent World.
The reason I bought the DVD recently was because I wanted to look at the film from a couple of different aspects; no longer from the point of view of an actress but that of the writer, and also for the story's historical content. The film is a fascinating portrait of French collaboration, released at a time when the subject was taboo in France, who collaboration was denied.
De Gaulle himself when he returned home refuted the idea that France had ever been anything but the Republic, an oppressed republic. This later became known as the Gaullist Resistance Myth. It wasn't until the early 70s when writers, historians and artists began to speak out, that the myth started to crumble. Many who were not direct supporters of the collaboration were held to account because they did nothing. Because they did not resist. Historians began to claim that collaboration was not forced upon France; many chose it and others turned a blind eye. Apathy, if not downright collaboration, allowed the regime to flourish.
This is an important issue and one that is becoming relevant again today when one considers that almost fifty per cent of the United States voters did not go to the polls during this recent election.
Both Malle and his co-writer, Patrick Modiano, were haunted by the years of Nazi occupation in France. For different reasons. Malle, born in 1932, was a child during the war and always felt himself implicated in the moral issues that growing up in occupied France would have thrown up for any sensitive child. His later film, another masterpiece, Au Revoir Les Enfants, (1987), recounts the story of pupil, Julien Quentin, and how his life is changed when three Jewish boys are given refuge at his Catholic boarding school. Friendships are bonded and broken when the three boys and the priest who has accepted to hide the Jewish pupils are arrested and taken away by the Nazis. All die in camps. The film is autobiographical.
Louis Malle
Along with Louis Malle, Patrick Modiano is co-credited for the (terrific) screenplay of Lacombe, Lucien. Modiano, thirteen years Malle's junior, was born in the Paris suburbs in 1945 to a Jewish-Italian father and an actress mother. They met in occupied Paris and carried out a clandestine relationship. Soon after Patrick was born, they separated and Patrick was brought up by various people including his maternal grandparents. His father, Albert, refused to wear the obligatory Yellow Star. Nor did he declare himself to the authorities when they were rounding up the Jews. Albert was arrested in 1942 but managed, through the help of a friend, to avoid deportation. He worked as a black marketeer and with the French Gestapo during the war years. Albert Modiano never owned up to his son about his nefarious doings during those years.
Aurore Clement as France Horn in Lacombe, Lucien
Aurore Clement is now 71 (still beautiful from the pics I found on the internet). Pierre Blaise who was both mesmeric and a fine young actor was killed in a car crash in 1975 at the age of 20, the year after the film was released.
In 1973, when Malle was preparing this film, he already had eight successful features to his name. As well, as a younger filmmaker he had worked as co-director with Jacques Cousteau on the Academy-Award winning documentary, The Silent World.
The reason I bought the DVD recently was because I wanted to look at the film from a couple of different aspects; no longer from the point of view of an actress but that of the writer, and also for the story's historical content. The film is a fascinating portrait of French collaboration, released at a time when the subject was taboo in France, who collaboration was denied.
De Gaulle himself when he returned home refuted the idea that France had ever been anything but the Republic, an oppressed republic. This later became known as the Gaullist Resistance Myth. It wasn't until the early 70s when writers, historians and artists began to speak out, that the myth started to crumble. Many who were not direct supporters of the collaboration were held to account because they did nothing. Because they did not resist. Historians began to claim that collaboration was not forced upon France; many chose it and others turned a blind eye. Apathy, if not downright collaboration, allowed the regime to flourish.
This is an important issue and one that is becoming relevant again today when one considers that almost fifty per cent of the United States voters did not go to the polls during this recent election.
Both Malle and his co-writer, Patrick Modiano, were haunted by the years of Nazi occupation in France. For different reasons. Malle, born in 1932, was a child during the war and always felt himself implicated in the moral issues that growing up in occupied France would have thrown up for any sensitive child. His later film, another masterpiece, Au Revoir Les Enfants, (1987), recounts the story of pupil, Julien Quentin, and how his life is changed when three Jewish boys are given refuge at his Catholic boarding school. Friendships are bonded and broken when the three boys and the priest who has accepted to hide the Jewish pupils are arrested and taken away by the Nazis. All die in camps. The film is autobiographical.
Along with Louis Malle, Patrick Modiano is co-credited for the (terrific) screenplay of Lacombe, Lucien. Modiano, thirteen years Malle's junior, was born in the Paris suburbs in 1945 to a Jewish-Italian father and an actress mother. They met in occupied Paris and carried out a clandestine relationship. Soon after Patrick was born, they separated and Patrick was brought up by various people including his maternal grandparents. His father, Albert, refused to wear the obligatory Yellow Star. Nor did he declare himself to the authorities when they were rounding up the Jews. Albert was arrested in 1942 but managed, through the help of a friend, to avoid deportation. He worked as a black marketeer and with the French Gestapo during the war years. Albert Modiano never owned up to his son about his nefarious doings during those years.
The novels of Patrick Modiano, Nobel Laureate for Literature 2014, are frequently peopled by shady characters and collaborators, or those on the run. This is partly what makes Modiano's work so extraordinary. Conscience, the outsider, he who works by night, guilt, memory ... all haunt his work.
Patrick Modiano
Malle and Modiano were the perfect fit for the groundbreaking subject of Lacombe, Lucien.
The action of the film is set in 1944 in south-west France close to the Spanish border during the German Occupation. It tells the tale of a seventeen-year-old peasant boy, Lucien, an anti-hero, whose father is an imprisoned member of the Resistance. Lucien, who seems to delight in killing and hunting small creatures, wants to get away from home - his mother is having an affair with a local farmer - to follow in his father's footsteps, but he is not taken seriously. He is rejected by the local schoolmaster, also a member of the Resistance, because he is too young.
Quite by chance Lucien finds himself falling in with a nest of collaborators, French agents working for the Gestapo, whose headquarters are at a hotel, La Grotto. They take in the lad and give him a job with the 'Police Allemande' after he has proved himself by betraying the school teacher who refused him a place amongst the partisans.
One of the French collaborators, along with his actress girlfriend, befriends Lucien. He takes the boy to a tailor to have a suit made. The tailor, Horn, is a Jew who has fled Germany and then Paris. It is when Lucien sets eyes on Horn's daughter, France, that the complexities of the narrative really set in. Naive, uncouth, barely more than a virgin, Lucien becomes besotted with the young woman and by the end of the film he helps her and her grandmother - the tailor, Horn, has been arrested - escape. However, the stolen car gives up before they have crossed the border into Spain and they are forced to take refuge - a most unlikely threesome - in a remote, abandoned farmhouse.
Throughout the film, the question of Lucien's complicity is, laid out before the spectator. Malle has chosen a very attractive and rather charming young actor for the role so our sympathies are easily given to the character. Is he a cruel, unfeeling boy or is he misguided? If he had been offered a role within the Resistance would his life have turned out differently? Can he be held responsible?
The last frame sees him sleeping in a field while France bathes naked in a nearby stream. Lucien seems so perfectly relaxed, at peace for the first time, that for one fleeting moment, you ask yourself whether the three might find a way to survive, yet you know, because a lurking danger is gnawing at your spectator's guts, that for different reasons they cannot survive; they are all hunted. Lucien, for his blatant betrayal of his own people and France along with her grandmother because they are Jews. Superimposed over the last image of the film are the bald sentences:
Lucien Lacombe was arrested on October 12, 1944.
Tried by a military court of the Resistance, he was sentenced to death and executed.
When the film was over, I felt saddened for the boy, for his loss of life, for his stupidity and all that was not to be. Still, he chose that path. He was complicit. There are two very moving scenes when Lucien's mother comes looking for him and finds him at the Horns' apartment. She has brought with her a small black coffin with Lucien's name engraved on it. It has been left at her door. A warning to Lucien to give up his treachery. His mother's eyes beg him to come home, to quit the shaming role he has taken. He refuses, saying that he is fine where he is. She steps away, and you feel swamped by the depth of a mother's conflict and heartbreak.
The film has been restored and is available in Blu Ray. It is a masterpiece as relevant today as when it was first shot. Stunning photography, long close-ups on faces that take you to the characters' souls. If you haven't seen it, I urge you to find a copy.
Since I watched it, I have been asking myself over and over about where our world is going given the recent election results in the United States. We are witnessing the rise of Nationalism, white supremacy, racism, closed borders, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism. Nazism.
Our world is in danger of regression. Values and liberties our parents, grandparents, previous generations fought or voted for, put their lives at risk for, might soon be lost. There is no place for apathy. We stand up and are counted, or we become a silent vote that condones these very real dangers.
Works of art have the possibility of reminding us; they can nudge our collective memories and help us learn from the past. Lest we forget.
www.caroldrinkwater.com
Quite by chance Lucien finds himself falling in with a nest of collaborators, French agents working for the Gestapo, whose headquarters are at a hotel, La Grotto. They take in the lad and give him a job with the 'Police Allemande' after he has proved himself by betraying the school teacher who refused him a place amongst the partisans.
One of the French collaborators, along with his actress girlfriend, befriends Lucien. He takes the boy to a tailor to have a suit made. The tailor, Horn, is a Jew who has fled Germany and then Paris. It is when Lucien sets eyes on Horn's daughter, France, that the complexities of the narrative really set in. Naive, uncouth, barely more than a virgin, Lucien becomes besotted with the young woman and by the end of the film he helps her and her grandmother - the tailor, Horn, has been arrested - escape. However, the stolen car gives up before they have crossed the border into Spain and they are forced to take refuge - a most unlikely threesome - in a remote, abandoned farmhouse.
Throughout the film, the question of Lucien's complicity is, laid out before the spectator. Malle has chosen a very attractive and rather charming young actor for the role so our sympathies are easily given to the character. Is he a cruel, unfeeling boy or is he misguided? If he had been offered a role within the Resistance would his life have turned out differently? Can he be held responsible?
The last frame sees him sleeping in a field while France bathes naked in a nearby stream. Lucien seems so perfectly relaxed, at peace for the first time, that for one fleeting moment, you ask yourself whether the three might find a way to survive, yet you know, because a lurking danger is gnawing at your spectator's guts, that for different reasons they cannot survive; they are all hunted. Lucien, for his blatant betrayal of his own people and France along with her grandmother because they are Jews. Superimposed over the last image of the film are the bald sentences:
Lucien Lacombe was arrested on October 12, 1944.
Tried by a military court of the Resistance, he was sentenced to death and executed.
When the film was over, I felt saddened for the boy, for his loss of life, for his stupidity and all that was not to be. Still, he chose that path. He was complicit. There are two very moving scenes when Lucien's mother comes looking for him and finds him at the Horns' apartment. She has brought with her a small black coffin with Lucien's name engraved on it. It has been left at her door. A warning to Lucien to give up his treachery. His mother's eyes beg him to come home, to quit the shaming role he has taken. He refuses, saying that he is fine where he is. She steps away, and you feel swamped by the depth of a mother's conflict and heartbreak.
The film has been restored and is available in Blu Ray. It is a masterpiece as relevant today as when it was first shot. Stunning photography, long close-ups on faces that take you to the characters' souls. If you haven't seen it, I urge you to find a copy.
Since I watched it, I have been asking myself over and over about where our world is going given the recent election results in the United States. We are witnessing the rise of Nationalism, white supremacy, racism, closed borders, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism. Nazism.
Our world is in danger of regression. Values and liberties our parents, grandparents, previous generations fought or voted for, put their lives at risk for, might soon be lost. There is no place for apathy. We stand up and are counted, or we become a silent vote that condones these very real dangers.
Works of art have the possibility of reminding us; they can nudge our collective memories and help us learn from the past. Lest we forget.
www.caroldrinkwater.com
Friday, 25 November 2016
Amalfi, by Miranda Miller
When
I was eight I went with my family to Positano, on the coast just
south of Naples. This was the beginning of my lifelong passion for
Italy and certain intense memories have stayed with me: the sight of
people living in caves in the mountainside; a vivid green lizard
disappearing into a sunlit wall; luscious fragrant peaches that were
so juicy you had to wash after you guzzled them. As an adult I came
to know Italy well but didn’t return to that coast until last month
when my husband and I spent a week in Amalfi. I always thought of
that stunning coast as existing purely for tourism of the most
indulgent kind but discovered, to my surprise, that Amalfi has a long
and complex history.
Its
origins are very vague; Amalfi
was a beautiful nymph (who still apears on the town banner) and Hercules
fell in love with her. Alternatively, in the fourth century, Roman
nobles in five ships set out from the new city of Constantinople
and, after many adventures, ended up at Scala, in the mountains above
Amalfi. Huns, Vandals and Goths invaded but Scala and Amalfi were
protected by their mountains. Before the rise of Venice Amalfi was a
great maritime power, part of the Byzantine empire until the Normans
invaded.
There
were bishops and doges and each doge announced his accession to the
Emperor in Constantinople. Although it was supposed to be a republic
the doges were really absolute monarchs from the same family. It was
a city of merchant adventurers with trading colonies as far away as
Beirut and Cairo.
In
1073 Robert Guiscard seized and sacked Amalfi and added 'Duke of
Amalfi' to his titles but Amalfi revolted and elected one last last
doge. After that the Normans ruled Amalfi and it grew into a city of
seventy thousand people with a flourishing cultural life and a big
fleet. Trading connections brought the Amalfitani in contact very
early with the process of paper making, which Arab merchants had
first discovered in China in the early Middle Ages, and there is
still a paper factory.
In
1343 a terrible earthquake struck the Bay of Naples. The tsunami
that followed destroyed the lower town of Amalfi which fell into the
sea. This tsunami was observed by the poet Petrarch, whose ship was
forced to return to port, and he wrote about it in the fifth book of
his Epistolae Familiares. So a great city was transformed
into a village with a harbour and just a few thousand residents.
Of course this kind of lost Atlantis story always has great
imaginative appeal and you wonder what ruined palaces and churches
you are swimming over.
The
second of the fifteenth century Piccolomini Dukes of Amalfi, Alfonso,
was married to Joanna of Aragon, who was Webster’s Duchess of
Malfi.
When
her husband died the Duchess fell in love with her steward, Antonio
Bologna, and secretly married him. She gave birth to his child,
Frederick, who was sent away to be brought up elsewhere and then they
had a girl. One of her brothers, a Cardinal, became suspicious so
Bologna escaped to Ancona with their children and the Duchess,
pregnant with their third child, followed. She said to her household
there, ‘I would rather live privately with my husband than remain
duchess.’
When
her brother the Cardinal heard this he had them banished from Ancona.
Bologna fled to Siena and then to Padua where he was eventually
killed. The Duchess with her children and maid was captured and
imprisoned in Torre dello Ziro, a tower between Amalfi and Atrani
(which is still there) where she is said to have been murdered by
her brothers. Webster would have got this gory tale from Bandello’s
Novelle
(1554). Bandello had known the real Bologna in Milan before his
assassination.
Amalfi
never regained its earlier importance. Later, that area was ruled by
Spain, then by Joseph Bonaparte, and in 1861 Francis 11, the last
King of Naples, had his kingdom absorbed into the kingdom of Italy.
Amalfi remained a quiet harbour town until the arrival of roads and
tourism. Every four years there is still a regatta of the four
ancient rival maritime republics: Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Amalfi. The
boat rowed by the Amalfi team, beautifully painted and carved, can be
seen in a courtyard near the sea.
Ravello,
in the mountains just above Amalfi, is also supposed to have been
founded by Roman fugitives. The Bishop of Ravello was
appointed directly from Rome and in the exquisite little Cathedral
Hadrian IV, Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman ever to be made
Pope, confirmed Norman William as King of Sicily.
In
the 12th century Ravello had about twenty-five thousand inhabitants
but now it is tiny. Its wonderful medieval palaces and gardens have
attracted many artists, musicians, and writers including Boccaccio,
Grieg, Escher, Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence. Wagner is thought to
have found inspiration for Parsifal in the gardens of the Villa
Ruffalo and until his death Gore Vidal lived in one of the medieval
palaces. Every summer Ravello has a classical music festival.
Thursday, 24 November 2016
A research visit to the V&A by Elizabeth Chadwick
Photography in the exhibition was not permitted, but the book has finely detailed images and the url above also displays some of the items on exhibit.
The themes are mostly religious, with the occasional moment of regal and baronial bling thrown in - such as fragments of horse trappings and seal bags bearing the lions of England. The ecclesiastical copes are just stunning. My particular favourite exhibit was the one on the way out and is a pall belonging to the guild of Fishmongers, made in the early 16th century and depicting a wonderful golden-haired mermaid holding up her mirror and with her reflection stitched inside it. I also rather liked some of the facial expression on the exhibits, especially the jolly, mischievous horses!
Although I couldn't take photographs at the exhibition, photography was permitted elsewhere in the museum and I took the opportunity to visit several galleries. As well as the European Medieval galleries which I often visit, I was particularly interested in Islamic Art of the Middle East this time around because my current work in progress, TEMPLAR SILKS, has deposited my hero William Marshal in the Middle East for two years of his life and there was so much cross culture in the region that he would have seen very similar items to those on display. Here is a selection of the pictures I took for my visual archive.
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| 13th century Syrian glass lamp depicting a falconer |
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| Rock crystal ewer 1000-1050 Egypt . |
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| Rock crystal container 975-1050 Egypt |
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| Incense burner 1250-1300 Egypt or Syria |
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| writing box Egypt 1302 |
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| moulded earthenware water flask 1200-1400 Syria |
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| Filter in the neck of a water jar to protect from impurities. |