The Walled Orchard by Tom Holt -- A Review by Susan Price

The only real regret I have about growing so old is the fact that I shan't live long enough to read the scathing dismemberment of the clowns who presently infest our public life by a historian who has access to all the evidence and can expose every lie, reveal the source of every pay-off and back-hander, can trace the cause and effect of every stupid blunder. But then, if I could last long enough to read the book, the rage induced by it would certainly finish me off.

I've been taking refuge in historical novels. I enjoy them. I enjoy trying to imagine myself in a world different to mine in almost every way, and understanding that world from a different mind-set.

Tom Holt is best known for writing comic fantasies -- a Rhine Maiden twisting modern men around her little finger, a modern international company being managed by a dwarf from the Nibelungenlied. If you want to read a darkly comic satire on office politics and how they're merely a pale reflection of the true power struggle between immortal gods and nymphs, Tom Holt is your man.

 
After enjoying several of his fantasies, I came across his The Walled Orchard, which is very different. It's set in the Athens of Socrates (who has a minor walk-on part) and is an exceptionally good historical novel. On first reading it, many years ago, and reading it again recently, I was surprised that Holt isn't far better known as a historical novelist.

The thing that struck me about The Walled Orchard both times I've read it,  is that there's no gasp about it.  I think most historicals have a gasp: -- either a gasp of horror and thankfulness that things were so horrible then and aren't any longer, or else a gasp of longing for a lost age of more Grace, Grandeur, Freedom or whatever the author imagines the past had and the present doesn't.

But the narrative of The Walled Orchard does not gasp. I can't think of another historical novel that so completely envelops you in its time.  It finds ancient Athens completely ordinary and rather grubby, every day, annoying and disappointing. Just like today, in fact. The book cares nothing for the future or its judgement.  It's funny, scathing, angry -- reading it is like listening to some honest, forthright and witty person raging about the bunch of numpties that have somehow inveigled themselves into power in our day. In fact, think Frankie Boyle in chiton and sandals.

The narrator of The Walled Orchard is Eupolis, a gentleman farmer whose vocation is writing comedies for the festival of Dionysus -- he hasn't much time for tragedies, finding them tiresome in the extreme, but he does know Euripedes a bit and is willing to gossip about him. (He also knows Aristophanes, his rival in the comedy stakes. He hates him.)

Eupolis' stock in trade is making fun of Athens' famous democracy and its famously democratic politicians and much of the book is a great rant about the stupidity and greed of the politicians and the (possibly) even greater stupidity and greed of the citizens -- not the slaves or the poor or the women, of course. They don't have votes and don't count in this fine democracy. (And Eupolis is fine with that.)

Eupolis admits to his own stupidity -- it led to him becoming embroiled in Athens' stupid, greedy attempt to conquer Sicily, which ended badly. The Athenian citizen chosen to be the army's general is ill and has no military experience whatsoever, while the Athenian navy and army are complacent and over-confident, certain that beating the Syracusans will 'be easy'. Oh, so easy.

Eupolis gives us an account of the Syracusan war, of a battle fought by night, where the Athenian army gets lost (several times) and then attacks itself and its allies (several times) because it can't tell who is who in the dark. It's both funny and appalling.

You can't help but be reminded of another bunch of incompetent, complacent boneheads, much nearer us in time and space, who are clattering around in the dark, attacking the wrong people and blaming everyone except themselves. Holt wrote the book 22 years ago but it's suddenly taken on a very contemporary ring.

Eupolis manages to get himself back to Athens, arriving before the news of the Athenian army's extermination. On learning about the defeat, and about the men and ships that have been lost, the city reels in shock -- and then looks round for a scapegoat. Its gaze falls on Eupolis.

There's much more to the book. The small details of everyday life in Athens are thick on every page but placed so deftly that you don't notice the skill with which they're introduced -- until you catch yourself believing that you're reading the memoirs of a man who lived that life, in that city and actually saw and did all these things.

Among all the down-to-earth, everyday gossip about what Euripides was really like, and how to improve your soil and increase your olive yield, and how to farm between Spartan invasions, there are a couple of supernatural episodes, which are unexpected and chilling.

Eupolis tells us how, as a boy, he nearly died in the plague outbreak that did kill his immediate family. He wakes, weak and dazed, in his deserted street and meets Dionysus, with whom he has a chat (recognising Him by His theatrical mask and prop leather phallus.) The God tells him that He kept Eupolis alive because He has a purpose for him. We'll meet again, says the God, and tells Eupolis where -- and they do meet there, in a thrown-away moment, all the more chilling for its sudden matter-of-factness. At this second meeting, Dionysus also informs him of a third and final meeting, which Eupolis is still awaiting in the book's closing pages.

After the plague leaves almost all his family dead, the young Eupolis finds himself rich from inheritances, in possession of enough land to join the city's upper classes. He not unnaturally concludes that Dionysus wants him to become a comic poet in His honour -- and he sets about serving the God by mocking and lambasting the city, its people and its politicians.

He hates Athens, he hates her stupid populace, he hates Tragedies and all other comic poets; he hates democracy and he hates his wife -- and he loves all of them, can't leave them, can't give them up.

Eupolis mentions that the plague has left him bald and with a twisted face -- he has a permanent, involuntary grin. His wife, Phaedra, a fearsome and unfaithful termagant, is beautiful when he first marries her but is later involved in a cart accident, where she is kicked in the face by a mule. Her broken jaw, badly set, leaves her with a permanent grin. So not only are they like an Athenian Punch and Judy, a knockabout stage comedy couple but they both grin like a couple of Comedy masks. Both of them mask their own natures too -- and perhaps Athens' theatre of noble tragedies and tragic heroes is a mask that hides the city's true spirit, which might be thought closer to the phalluses, scatology, abuse and violence of the comedies. 


Comedy is always about real life, baseness and failure, while Tragedy is about the sublime: impossible Gods and heroes. Eupolis lives and ends his life as a comic hero -- a failure as a husband and a father, a playwright who knows his plays will be forgotten and who didn't even mean as much to His God as he thought he did. He advises us to heed the one thing he's learned in life which is: While travelling, go and have something to eat immediately and leave the sight-seeing until later. Then at least you've had a good meal.

The Walled Orchard certainly isn't a failure. It's impressive and it achieves this difficult thing: it makes you see ancient Athens as clearly and realistically as it's perhaps possible for us to see it: as completely ordinary and a bit squalid. No gasp at all. 

Tom Holt's other novels set in ancient Greece are also well worth a read:
 

 Olympiad

Alexander At The World's End.

Susan Price's historical trilogy

 The Sterkarm Handshake,

 A Sterkarm Kiss and

 Sterkarm Tryst, 

can be found here.

Susan Price's website is here.

The Warlow Experiment review by Mary Hoffman

It's not often you get a Press Release for a book, with a quotation from Hilary Mantel. Here it is in full:
"Alix Nathan cuts against cliché, against the received version, against cosiness. She leaves her reader restless, curious, wanting more. She is an original, with a virtuoso touch."

Alix Nathan author photo by Jan Klos

Having read Nathan's adult novel, The Warlow Experiment, I wouldn't disagree, though I do have some reservations, which I'll get to later.

The starting point for the book was a snippet Nathan found in which Herbert Powyss advertised, in 1793, for someone to live solitarily underground for seven years, without human contact, in return for £50 a year for life.

A tame hermit wasn't a rarity in the eighteenth century but this was not a request for some sort of human ornament to a formal garden. It was a scientific experiment. Alix Nathan takes that advertisement and runs with it. History doesn't relate what actually happened but the novelist fleshes out the situation, the character of Herbert Powyss, John Warlow, who takes up the offer, his wife, Powyss' servants and the relations between them all.

A German "garden hermit" in the 18th century

 As she tells it, the only person to apply for the "job" is John Warlow, a labourer with a wife and several children, some living, some dead. He must agree, as the original ad stated, not to cut his hair or fingernails and toenails for the full seven years. His meals are sent down to him on a dumb waiter and he gets the same food as Powyss. His bodily waste is sent back up in the same dumb waiter; the details are not for the squeamish.

The apartment created for the experiment in the cellar is comfortable, well-furnished, with books Warlow can scarcely read and a chamber organ he certainly can't play. He has a comfortable bed, plenty of candles and fuel for his fire, tobacco as needed and a laundry service for his clothes.

The bath has only a cold water feed but, as Warlow barely washes, this is hardly a problem. 

It is clear that Powyss was expecting a very different subject to respond to his offer. One of the tasks for the confined man is to keep a journal; another to keep the clock wound every eight days. Both tasks prove equally impossible for Warlow.

Powyss, a single man in possession of a fortune but with no inclination to marry, lives in a big house, where he is obsessed with having a paper published by the Royal Society, of which he is an enthusiastic member. his passion is gardening. He collects seeds and other specimens, like many another eighteenth century amateur botanist.

But the incarceration of John Warlow is going to be the subject of his projected paper: Investigation into the Resilience of the Human Mind Without Society.

It is clear from the beginning that the concept of the experiment does not allow for the individual response of the subject: Warlow gradually deteriorates over four years from even the degree of civilisation he had at the beginning. He has literally nothing to do; at least nothing he is capable of doing. In such a situation, the book suggests, a man with gradually run mad and destroy his surroundings.

Meanwhile, up in the rest of the house, Powyss sees Hannah Warlow once a week to give her money for herself and the children. He becomes attracted to her and she to him. And his degeneration parallels that of the man living in the cellar.

The servants are curious about Warlow and one of them, Abraham Price, the gardener, is a follower of Tom Paine, who feels the immured man is being deprived of his rights. As a result of a chain of events, it is Price who releases Warlow ahead of time, a liberation which leads to violence, madness  and deaths.

And here is where my reservations lie. Nathan's novel is an experiment in itself, a forensic study of the effect on solitude on a human being, which pre-empts whatever Powyss might have written in his paper. And every human relationship in the story ends tragically. It is this lack of redemption or any kind of hope which made the book for me something short of great.

Julie Summers' "Our Univited Guests" by Janie Hampton

Trainee agents on the rope bridge across the muddy River Cam 
at Audley End, Essex. ©Polish Underground Movement 

Oxford writer Julie Summers has written another extraordinary book about the realities of life in Britain during the Second World War. ‘Our Uninvited Guests’ focuses on the people who had to leave their homes and start new lives in places where Hitler's Blitz could not reach them. Oxfordshire coped with over 37,000 evacuees moved from more vulnerable areas of southern England. Nobody then had heard the rumour that Hitler would never bomb Oxford, when Blenheim Palace, about 12 miles up the road from Oxford, was colonised by schoolboys.
When in September 1939, Malvern College in Worcestershire was requisitioned for civil servants, the private school was moved into Blenheim Palace. They brought with them 55 van loads of books, iron bedsteads and musical instruments, including 20 pianos. The laundry was converted into physics and biology laboratories, while the riding school became the gymnasium. The windows of all 187 rooms had to be blacked out so that no chink of light could be seen by the Luftwaffe. The boys slept in the state rooms where valuable artworks were covered with board to protect them from stray darts and ink bombs.

Items transported from Malvern College, Worcestershire to Blenheim Palace, 
Oxford shire, included twenty pianos and 400 beds. © Country Life

Pregnant women from the East End of London were evacuated to Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire to give birth to their babies. Still a splendid house, it had been the home of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite British Prime Minister. Lady Melbourne had decorated the principal rooms for her lover, the future George IV. Mothers recovering from childbirth slept in hospital beds in the lavish surroundings of the Prince Regent’s suite, stripped of its red and gold pagoda double bed, but not its beautiful Chinese wallpaper. The new born babies were bathed next to the wine cellar in the basement.

In Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, mothers recover from childbirth in the Prince 
Regent’s suite, decorated in early 19th century Chinese wallpaper. 
© Imperial War Museum 

Summers toured round England and Scotland, finding out the role of Britain's stately homes and country houses. Using extensive research and interviews, she describes in rich detail, life in some of Britain’s greatest country houses which were occupied by people who would otherwise never have seen such opulent surroundings. People from all walks of life often found the splendour and opulence at odds with their needs. The Rothschilds’ magnificent French chateau-inspired Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, housed one hundred children under the age of five evacuated from London. They ate lobster, rabbit curry, and Woolton Pie - a vegetable recipe named after the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton. Over in Warwickshire, Lord Bearsted moved his bank ‘Samuel & Co’ from London to his country home Upton House. There his 23 employees were provided with wellington boots and ate rook pie.
Coleshill House in Oxfordshire was a 17th Century mansion with no heating, no electricity and water pumped by hand. Recruits to the ‘Auxillary Units’ – a secret band of saboteurs preparing for invasion by Germans - lived in the stables. They each received a crash course in unarmed combat, petrol bombs, booby traps and explosives to attack the invading army’s supplies and transport. At night they roamed the surrounding countryside to practice this art of ungentlemanly guerrilla warfare. Over 600 underground operation bases were constructed all over England for the stay-behind saboteurs to attack from behind. Their whereabouts was top secret. Had there been in invasion in 1940, the life expectancy of saboteurs was estimated to be about 15 days.

Operation bases for saboteurs were constructed
underground and their locations kept top secret. 

‘Our Uninvited Guests’ captures the spirit of upheaval when thousands of houses were requisitioned by the government for the armed forces, secret services and government offices as well as vulnerable children, the sick and the elderly, all of whom needed to be housed safely, or secretly. In Essex, Polish special agents were trained in the grounds of Audley End House, a royal palace in the 17th century. In the old nursery and the extensive woods, they learned the skills needed to make their way back into occupied Europe and carry out sabotage and subterfuge.
I have to confess that Summers and I are friends: we go on regular walks with our dogs on the Thames towpath. We support each other in the trials and tribulations of writing social history – the excitement of new discoveries; the brain exhaustion of writing it into a readable book; and the joy of publication. Our books cover similar periods in European history, so we often share ideas and swap contacts. Once we went to interview the same person together - an elderly woman who was both a WWII evacuee (Julie’s interest) and a Brownie Guide (mine). It was fascinating to witness how we extracted quite different stories from the same person. But I’m not the only person who has enjoyed this book, which has been well reviewed. Craig Brown wrote in The Mail On Sunday, 'Julie Summers has an amazing instinct for unearthing good stories and telling quotes.' 'Summers is a good and knowledgeable writer…powerful, emotional stuff' stated The Independent newspaper, while BBC History Magazine said the books is 'A poignant, lingering account. ' 

A student midwife bathes a new born baby next to the wine cellar
at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire. © Imperial War Museum 

 Summers is a former History Girl blogger, and her most well-known book is ‘Jambusters’ a history of the Women’s Institute during the Second World War. This inspired the ITV television series ‘Home Fires’ which ran for two exciting seasons. Sadly, we were all left wondering who had died in the final scene of a plane crashing into a house. We had to content ourselves with the knowledge that the people inside were fictional, and not the real members of a rural Women’s Institute. Summers’ latest thought-provoking and evocative narrative captures a crucial period in the social history of Britain.

‘Our Uninvited Guests- the Secret lives of Britain’s country houses 1939-45',

 published by Simon & Schuster, 2018. 

                 Janie Hampton            Julie Summers

How Vincent Van Gogh Fell in Love with Japan - by Lesley Downer

‘a little yellow house with green door and shutters, whitewashed inside - on the white walls - very brightly coloured Japanese drawings - red tiles on the floor.’ 

A couple of weekends ago I was in Amsterdam to see an irresistible exhibition - Van Gogh and Japan at the Van Gogh Museum. I wondered what Vincent, poor tormented soul, would have made of that vast glitzy museum devoted to his works and memory, with its mobs of visitors and museum shops selling everything from Van Gogh luggage to Van Gogh dog coats. He was not exactly poor. His brother Theo who worked for a Paris art dealer took care of him. But he never found much success either during his life. He only sold one painting to anyone other than Theo.

Sudden Shower over Shin Ohashi, Atake, Hiroshige (L)

Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), Van Gogh (R)

In February 1886, when Van Gogh was thirty three, he arrived back in Paris after ten years roaming from Ramsgate to the Low Countries. He lived there with Theo for two years and made friends with artists such as Émile Bernard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac. 

He also became acquainted with the celebrated art dealer Siegfried Bing. Pretty much ever since Japan opened to the west in 1858 the west had been flooded with Japanese arts and crafts. All Paris along with half the western world was afire with Japonisme, unbridled enthusiasm for all things Japanese, and Siegfried Bing had largely cornered the market.

Over the following winter Van Gogh bought up more than 600 Japanese woodblock prints. He planned to sell them. But as he leafed through them he was transfixed by the dramatic designs, compositions, bright colours, strong lines and extraordinary viewpoints, all startling and fresh to western eyes.

It’s well known that Van Gogh was much influenced by Japanese art but this is the first exhibition to bring together so many of Van Gogh’s paintings alongside the prints that inspired them. It also broadens out the picture to reveal how much Van Gogh’s view of life was brightened by what he called these ‘cheerful prints’ - and how they played a part in shaping other aspects of his life.

Courtesan (after Eisen) by Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s first forays into Japanese art were to paint copies of three woodblock prints. One was Keisai Eisen’s Courtesan which featured on the cover of a special Japan edition of the magazine Paris Illustré. The others were landscape prints by Hiroshige which he had bought. It’s extraordinary to contrast Van Gogh’s dense impassioned brush strokes with the clean cool lines of the Japanese originals. The images are the same though he’s surrounded his courtesan with Japanese motifs - bamboo, cranes, frogs and waterlilies. But the techniques and mood and final effect are radically different.

He also painted a portrait of his art dealer, Julien Tanguy, against a backdrop of woodblock prints, including Van Gogh’s own courtesan painting.

Portrait of Pere Tanguy by Vincent Van Gogh

After two years in Paris he couldn’t stand the hustle and bustle any longer and in 1888 moved south. It was as if he was besotted with Japan, looking for it everywhere. On the way south he kept gazing out of the train window to see ‘if it was like Japan yet.’ He was sure he would find his dream of Japan there. He took with him a few woodblock prints, not famous or expensive ones but cheerful colourful depictions of landscapes and women.

In Arles, the natural beauty and bright light and cheerful colours recreated Japan for him. The southern light, he wrote, turned everything into ‘Japan’. There was a field of irises there which he painted and described as a Japanese dream. He writes of the landscape of La Crau with its peach trees, ‘Everything there is small, the gardens, the fields, the trees, even those mountains, as in certain Japanese landscapes, that’s why this subject attracted me.’ ‘I’m always saying to myself that I’m in Japan here,’ he said in another letter. ‘That as a result I only have to open my eyes and paint right in front of me what makes an impression on me.’ 

Rock of Montmajour by Vincent van Gogh

Hakone by Ando Hiroshige

In the exhibition Van Gogh’s paintings hang close to the Japanese prints which inspired them. He sought out subjects akin to those which he saw in the prints. There is a dramatic painting of a quarry, The Rock of Montmajour, dotted with trees, of which he writes, ‘You’ll well remember there are Japanese drawings where grasses and little trees grow there and there’. Hung opposite is Hiroshige’s dramatic print of the crags at Hakone with a huge crag, with grass and trees growing out of it, dwarfing the people and hanging at an impossible angle over the water.

 

The paintings Van Gogh did in Arles are very different from his earlier work. ‘After some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel colour differently,’ he wrote to Theo. He plays with colour, laying on bright flat areas of intense colour with impassioned brush strokes. He painted The Yellow House set against a flat blue sky almost more solid than the house itself and his bedroom and yellow bed using ‘flat plain tints like Japanese prints,’ with strong outlines, flat colour planes and no shadows. Inspired by the Japanese prints which hung around his studio, he applied thick black contour lines and played with extraordinary perspectives and viewpoints. He painted Almond Blossom, seen from below against a dazzling turquoise sky, in honour of the birth of his nephew, Theo’s son. In The Sower, the dramatic diagonal of the tree trunk cuts across the picture, silhouetted against a huge yellow sun.

Self-portrait dedicated to
Gauguin by Vincent van Gogh

In Arles Van Gogh hoped to enjoy his dream of a Japanese way of life. He imagined humble Japanese woodblock print artists living and working together like monks in a monastery and decided to set up an artists’ colony with his friend Paul Gauguin as the leader. Like Japanese artists, they exchanged self portraits. In the portrait he sent Gauguin he depicts himself as a very un-Buddha-like Japanese monk with a shaven head and intense wild eyes, somewhat slanted.

But as we know it didn’t work out. The collaboration with Gauguin came to an end, the artists’ colony fell through. Van Gogh cut off his ear, checked himself into a hospital and painted feverishly, producing a painting a day. When he couldn’t go outside he painted through the bars of his window.

The last part of this absorbing and fascinating exhibition takes us right inside Van Gogh’s studio, surrounded by the Japanese prints that he had pinned to the wall - unframed, working tools, some torn and paint-stained. He often mentions the cheeriness of the brightly-coloured prints of landscapes and beautiful women. Perhaps he hoped to find peace of mind by surrounding himself with such serene images. But alas, that was the one thing he was destined never to find.

Van Gogh and Japan at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, continues till June 24th 2018.




Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All Van Gogh images © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

All other images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Jackie Review by Katherine Clements

Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy

Just one week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963, his widow invited Life Magazine journalist, Theodore H. White, to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port. She had a story to tell.

In the resulting piece (which you can read here) White focuses on Jackie Kennedy's hazy memories of that horrific day in Dallas, but at its core is a determined fixation on one idea: the idealisation of something lost. She says:

“At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack like to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
Life Magazine 6 December 1963

Jackie Kennedy was the first to link her husband’s curtailed presidency with the Arthurian myth – the idea of the Kennedy era as a glorious golden age that would never be repeated; an enduring association that entered, and has remained, part of the American political narrative.

The media has long been fascinated with the glamorous Kennedy family and conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination. Numerous films and TV biopics have added layers to the story. The latest of these is Jackie, written by Noah Oppenheim, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Natalie Portman as the enigmatic woman who was such a crucial part of the myth she helped to create.

But this is not really a biopic. The interview with White (played with alternating sympathy and frustration by Billy Crudup) serves as a looking glass through which we watch the assassination itself, the aftermath and JFK’s funeral, all told in flashback through Jackie’s eyes. We are given a snapshot – a momentary insight into a woman who fascinated the public for decades.

Larraín claims that he refused to shoot the film without Portman and it’s easy to see why. Portman’s Oscar-nominated performance is utterly compelling, the similarity almost eerie. She’s worked hard to capture Jackie’s physicality – the formality, the stiff, awkward mannerisms and flat Transatlantic accent that make uncomfortable opposition with moments of intense emotion. The camera seems captivated by her. Lots of close ups leave Portman nowhere to hide - hammering home the intensity of the character’s distress and the painful scrutiny of the media. She knows the eyes of the world are watching.

And this contradiction is at the film’s heart. Portman presents a portrait of a woman teetering on the edge of sanity; one moment trembling and crying, or wandering, drunk and hopeless, around a deserted White House, the next exhibiting extraordinary strength and perception, and a steely determination to get what she wants. Portman portrays Jackie as complex and conflicted. This is not just the story of a grieving wife falling apart or an inspirational demonstration of fortitude, but both, and all the stronger and more human for it.

We get insights in Jackie’s ‘true’ feelings in moving scenes with an unnamed priest (played by John Hurt, in the last film released before his death). As she expresses doubts about her Catholic faith, we sense not just a spiritual crisis but her increasingly tenuous grasp on reality: ‘‘I lost track somewhere. What was real. What was performance.” And we see that her actions are not entirely altruistic.

The extraordinary soundtrack, composed by Mica Levi, serves as a powerful reflection of Jackie’s precarious state of mind. Sweeping strings seem to tilt and slide, lending a feeling of queasy instability. It’s ethereal and otherworldly, with an ominous edge. The film would have been a very different experience without it.

But this is more than just a character study. It asks questions about history – who writes it and who decides what to present as truth. As Jackie astutely says, "When something is written down, does that make it true?" Surely, a question for our times.

So, should we read Jackie as fact or fiction?

Jackie Kennedy, 1957, by Tony Frissell

The real Jackie was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, into a privileged Catholic family. She attended boarding school in Connecticut and Vassar College in New York. By the time she met John F. Kennedy in 1951, she was a promising young journalist working for the Washington Times-Herald. Well read, cultured and stylish, she was, on paper, a perfect politician’s wife. They married in 1953. JFK became President in 1961 when Jackie was just 31. As First Lady, Jackie undertook a vast restoration project in the White House, buying and returning original furniture and many prized historical artefacts. She championed the arts and established the White House as a centre of cultural activity, hosting lavish parties, dinners and concerts. When CBS broadcast a televised tour of the newly restored White House, eighty million Americans tuned in.

Clips from that documentary and other archive footage are used seamlessly throughout - a constant and effective reminder that much of what we’re watching really happened. By 1963, Jackie was already familiar with tragedy. She had suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth before her first surviving child, Caroline, was born in 1957. A son, Patrick, survived only two days, passing in August 1963, only three months before his father’s assassination.

We get a glimpse behind the scenes of the Kennedy presidency too. Peter Sarsgaard puts in a solid performance as Bobby Kennedy, lamenting missed opportunities and railing against the family’s destiny to be remembered as nothing more than ‘the beautiful people’. In reality, JFK’s presidency was marred by Cold War tensions and the Cuban Missile Crisis. His progressive attempts to expand civil rights for African-Americans were limited by his opponents. Some historians have argued that he doesn’t deserve the accolades and that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, led a much more effective administration. But that’s the point here: Jackie knew this and set out to change the story. She understood how her actions in the aftermath of the tragedy would echo long through history. Her real life involvement in JFK’s funeral arrangements, which she modelled after those of President Lincoln, could not have been a more strident statement. It was indeed ‘a spectacle’ fit for royalty.

The family leaves the Capitol after JFK's funeral service.

Ultimately, that’s the genius of this film. It gives us a compelling, moving picture of grief, while simultaneously deconstructing the myth it purports to celebrate. It challenges the narrative while showing us how that narrative was spun. Somehow, it manages to do this sensitively, with respect.

Jackie gives us another interpretation of the JFK story, another version of the truth, another layer to the myth, but a valuable one. After watching, I found myself reading up, wanting to know more about Jackie and her ill-fated husband. And that, to me, is a mark of successfully dramatised history, whether on page or screen. After all, as Jackie observes:  “Sometimes, the characters we read about on the page end up being more real that the men who stand beside us”.

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The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo A review by Tanya Landman

I’ve always been fascinated by the real life story of Caraboo – a warrior princess from the tropical island of Javasu, captured by pirates, taken half way around the world before she escaped from them by jumping ship in the Bristol Channel and swimming to shore.  Homeless in a foreign country she was taken in as a house guest by the Worrall family of Knole Park, Almondsbury, in 1817. There she spent weeks speaking in an incomprehensible language, hunting with a bow and arrows, swimming naked in the lake, climbing trees and praying to a pagan god.

 

This strange, exotic beauty was a sensation, charming everyone she met until she was recognised and exposed. In reality she was Mary Willcox, a cobbler’s daughter from Witheridge in Devon.

The story of Princess Caraboo is an intriguing one not least because no one really knows what Mary’s motivation was.  As Catherine Johnson points out in her author’s note this wasn’t a con trick as such – Mary Willcox didn’t profit financially from it.  She was never prosecuted for fraud – in fact Mrs Worrall obviously cared deeply about Mary, paying for her fare to America after her identity was revealed and treasuring the letters Mary sent back.

So why did Mary Willcox do it?

Catherine Johnson’s answer to that question is a piece of genius:  it’s brilliantly simple and makes perfect psychological sense.

She wasn’t pretending.

Set in the early 19^th century,  the book opens with the brutal ‘end’ of Mary Willcox.  The very first chapter sees her raped at the side of the road - after having been betrayed and abandoned by her lover and having given birth to a stillborn child.   To escape the trauma, to save her own sanity this damaged girl retreats into a place of safety inside her own head: she is no longer Mary Willcox, but becomes instead the invincible warrior princess Caraboo.

What has begun as a simple survival mechanism starts to get complicated when other people become involved. Caraboo arrives at an inn and is then taken home by Cassandra, the rich, bored daughter of the Worrall family. Her mother – whose interest in anthropology is something of an obsession – is fascinated by the new arrival. Soon the whole family is caught up in Mary’s fantasy not because Caraboo is particularly cunning or conniving, but because they so desperately want to believe she is real.

Catherine Johnson’s novel is a crackingly good read:  a thoroughly gripping story in which all the characters – even the spoilt rich ones – are so warmly drawn and engaging you really mind about what happens to them. The love story that slowly develops between the Lady Caraboo and Fred Worrall is so tenderly written it made me cry.

The nature of lies and deception, fantasy and reality, love and honesty is explored in a book that says so much about the power of stories and our desire for exotic fiction rather than prosaic truth. There are moments of bleakness, moments where we seem to be in a world where love is nothing but self-deception, where all human relationships are a sham. 

But there’s a wonderful paradox at the heart of the novel – the fictional creation of Princess Caraboo takes the characters on a journey that brings them closer to their true selves. What begins as a lie actually redeems Mary Willcox and Fred Worrall and offers both real hope for a happier future.

Orkney: A Historical Guide by Caroline Wickham-Jones - reviewed by Joan Lennon

This is not the first occasion I've indulged my delight in guide books and Orkney (see The Elevated Limpet) but this time I've brought things right up-to-date.

Caroline Wickham-Jones is an experienced archaeologist who has worked on and written about sites across Scotland and Scandanavia.  Her Orkney: A Historical Guide was first published in 1998 and has been updated and re-issued a number of times since then.  Wickham-Jones' clear writing, expertise and obvious enthusiasm for her subject make her brand-new 2015 Guide a must-read for anyone drawn to this approximately 70-island-strong historical treasure trove.

There is so much to see, and one of the confusing things about visiting Orkney is the way remains from so many different historical periods often sit cheek-by-jowl in the landscape.  Wickham-Jones' Guide is extremely helpful in separating the layers out, starting with a series of maps, which show:

     Neolithic sites
     Bronze Age, Iron Age and Pictish sites
     Norse and Scottish Earls sites
     18th- and 19th-century sites
     20th-century sites

The chapters of the book take the same approach, with an overview for each block of time and then a description of sites of interest - and accessibility.  She also explores the effects of geography on the Orkney Islands' history.  The power of the winds, the fertility of the soil, the lack of trees and the easily splittable sandstone rock - all have their place in the way human life here was shaped and preserved. 

I would thoroughly recommend this Historical Guide for your reading and research pleasure - and I would also thoroughly recommend using it on a visit to Orkney.  Orkney may seem a bit out-of-the-way (though you can't really see the edge of the world from there, as Pytheas of Marseille claimed in 330 BCE).  But for a large part of her 10,000 years of habitation, the sea roads made her nearer to being at the heart of things than the edge.  Granted those roads were treacherous* and, as Wickham-Jones says,

"Rather like a six-lane motorway today, you have to know what you are doing, but the northern seas could lead you directly to your destination and provide varied benefits in the form of sheltered harbours and plentiful supplies."

Reading her book, I defy you not to be convinced that those "plentiful supplies" include history preserved in abundance, to excite the imagination and furnish us with thoughts and ideas, whether as readers, writers or historians. 

* Don't worry - the roads to Orkney are much safer now. 


Caroline Wickham-Jones' Orkney: A Historical Guide
pub. Birlinn Books
pub. date 12 March 2015
ISBN: 9781780272641          


(With a YA novel inspired by Skara Brae coming out mid-June, and therefore at too late a stage to change anything, I approach all archaeological writing on my period with some uneasiness ... I'll be talking more about that another time!)

        

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