Spring creeps northward but here above the 45th parallel, the lilacs are still sleeping.
Wonderblue, a French hybrid cultivar, is also known as Little Boy Blue Lilac. Its scent was non-existent Saturday when I shot this, probably due to the fluctuating weather here in Salt Lake.
“You have to buy this, my friend said, thrusting Jane Gardam’s Old Filth at me.
We were standing at a table full of donated second-hand books, a fundraiser for our club.
“Why would I want to read a book called Filth”?
“Because it is very funny and a terrific read. Filth stands for “Failed in London Try Hong Kong. It’s about the Brits who went East to manage the British Empire.”
I read Old Filth and loved it. I searched out its sequel The Man in the Wooden Hat, and when the last of the trilogy, Last Friends, came out a few weeks ago, I devoured it. Then I started at the beginning and read them all again.
Sir Edward Feathers QC, a renowned judge by the end of his career, begins by “failing” in London and ends as a wealthy lawyer in Hong Kong. He is tall, good looking, always immaculately turned out – the first paragraph of the first book establishes this – and invariably called Filth, even to his face. He began life as a Raj orphan, a child of a Brit in the foreign service, sent home to England at 5 to live apart from his parents and to go to school. Like his cousins and the woman he eventually marries, Elizabeth Macintosh, and many other such children, his personality is shaped by that experience. Eddie and his cousins have a particularly bad start because their foster mother is such a sadist that the children wish her ill- with spectacular success.
These children know duty and loyalty but very little warmth and affection. The third main character, Terry Veneering, comes from a “lower” class, is brought up by loving if poor parents, is capable of love and spontaneity and is, of course, universally looked down upon as crass, despite the fact that he is every bit as successful as Filth both in Hong Kong and England. He is also Filth’s arch rival in love and law, but by a quirk of fate, ends up living next door to him in retirement. When he finds this out, Filth thinks to himself, “Well, thank God, Betty is gone.”
So it is not a spoiler to report that the novels end in death. Indeed they begin with death and only then go back to report the anarchic beginnings before World War II -Eddie’s childhood – and shortly after the war – his marriage to Betty in Hong Kong with a few glimpses of life at the height of his career and retirement to Donheads St Ague, in Dorset, southern England.
How can novels that begin with death be so entirely upbeat and genuinely funny? A secret known only to those of us like Gardam who have reached a certain age? (80 is the new 50!)
Gardam writes in episodes and flashbacks and uses incremental repetition. Some events like the wedding and Betty’s sudden death in her tulip bed are described more than once, sometimes in the same words but always with additional insight and variations on the initial telling. Old Filth tells Edward’s story, The Man in the Wooden Hat is more from Betty’s point of view and Last Friends is mostly Veneering’s although two peripheral characters, Dulcie and Fiscal-Smith, survive the other three and it is they from whom the novel takes its title. Or perhaps not. Perhaps in the end, even enemies are friends, at last.
The reviews for Last Friends are a mixed bag – some raves, some forgiving and some absolute pans – but personally, I wouldn’t take tea with those who panned it. Courtney Cook in the Los Angeles Review of Books (April 18, 2013) “Read Jane Gardam”, began by introducing readers to Gardam’s Queen of the Tambourine (1991), Crusoe’s Daughter (1985) and God on the Rocks (1978), before she gets to the trilogy. She calls Gardam’s books “a taxonomy of madness” by which she means “extreme confusion due to circumstances you can’t understand, can’t control and can’t possibly have foreseen”. Eddie Feathers, for example, is evacuated from wartime England to safety with his father who is serving in Shanghai. It takes months for his ship to near its destination just in time for the fall of the colony and, so, Eddie finds himself England-bound once more. Before he is carried off on a stretcher, he has spent the better part of a year on one ship or another. There are all sorts of dire happenings referred to – Japanese internment camps, bombing raids, ships torpedoed -if not actually depicted, but always with Gardam’s sure touch. Courtney Cook says one of the writer’s strengths is the way she handles death: “People die left and right in her books … and it’s horrible and it’s funny in that way that makes you feel badly and then all right again.”
Whenever I am reading a Jane Gardam novel, I feel optimistic and even happy about life.
I loved Last Friends because it gave me more of three characters I had come to like. I learned about Veneering’s early life in Herringfleet and the series of miraculous choices and interventions that kept him alive and prosperous into his old age, and, I suppose, because the trilogy muses on aging, an experience one finds oneself caught up in willy nilly despite the eternally youthful inner self.
Jane Gardam said, “What I don’t want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw ‘Octegenarian Jane Gardam’ and I thought ‘Blow me!’ I mean I am but that’s not the point.”
I am reblogging this beautiful picture from My Botanical Garden
Last week ( Sun April 21) an Amorphophalus titanum or corpse flower bloomed in Edmonton, a noteworthy event. There are only about 5 such cultivated blooms a year, world-wide, and an individual plant does not bloom for several years. In its natural habitat, the jungles of Sumatra, there are probably more.
The one at the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton, Alberta was the first to bloom in western Canada. It grew from a dormant 225 lb tuber flown up from Boston last fall. The bloom lasted for a little over 24 hours, attracted 3,500 visitors and smelled like rotting flesh.
It was my privilege to be in the right place -within driving distance of the Huntington Library- at the right time -August 6, 2002 – to see the Amorphophallus titanum in full bloom and redolent of corpse.
People actually do fly great distances to witness this miracle. One of those was Jen Gerson, the National Post reporter, who wrote “Thousands Come for Rare Bloom”, (Wed. April 24, 2013) But, alas, Jen arrived Tuesday by which time the flower had wilted and its perfume abated. I can attest to that short life span. I went back to the Huntington on Saturday, August 10, 2002 and found the 6 ft spadex or”phallus” wilted and even more amorphus (ill-shaped).
The tallest specimen on record appears to have been 9 ft. tall. Even the one I saw dwarfed all viewers as they huddled leeward.
My encounter with the Stinky Flower occurred at a low point in my life. I had fallen into one of those black moods where you can’t remember how to put one foot in front of the other. It did seem like a reckless plan to keep my 8 year-old grandson, Leo, out of school and set out from Culver City. It’s easy to get there I was told: go to the end of the 110 where it turns into South Arroyo, turn right onto California and then Allen. This advice for a person who could no longer master left, right, left.
Leo’s safety seemed to concentrate my mind, however, and we found ourselves waiting in a long line in the hot sun, being plied with free bottles of water. Leo was very excited by the prospect of a really bad smell. The Huntington had thoughtfully called it a Stinky Flower so as not to upset childish sensibilities by calling it Corpse Flower. Sir David Attenborough had invented his own name when he featured the plant in his series “The Secret Life of Plants”, feeling that repetition of Amorphophallus titanum would be inappropriate. He called it titan arum.
As we waited, we boned up on why it smells so bad. It’s all a question of the birds and the bees, wouldn’t you know or, more precisely carrion beetles and flies which pollinate the plant. These flies, children were told, fed on decaying meat. Leo, being Leo, got the straight goods out of me by careful questioning.
The Post report described the smell as a diaper pail that’s been left out in the garbage in hot weather or minnows forgotten on a boat. The closer we got, the more people covered their noses. Even Leo began to wonder if he was up to it. Despite the still hot air, the porch where the plant stood seemed to have an air current and we kept circling until we could stand the putrid odour. It was definitely trial by smell.
The spadex apparently has a velvety texture, is shaped, according to one report, like a French loaf and is purple, a visual imitation of putrefying flesh. The huge cup-shaped flower is also purple inside and green outside.
When we had had all we could take (and out of deference to those out there waiting in the sun) we retreated to a cafe table with an sun umbrella. By chance the docent who had given the “tour” talk sat at the next table. Where, demanded Leo, could he get some of those seeds. A lively discussion ensued about possible places where he could grow such a plant.
He was not so interested in the HUntington’s other offerings – a first folio edition of Hamlet, a Guttenberg Bible or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
That night, I dreamed I was a young woman, very depressed, and I had been asked to a formal dance by Blake. I knew he would get me a floral corsage and that in the course of the evening, it would die and get repulsive so that I would have a hard time wearing it. Indeed when we met for the event, he was no longer the tanned, trim, athletic boy he actually was but slightly over-weight, soft and -how did I know- hopelessly behind in technology. When I woke up, I felt as if I had created something of great scope and beauty, which had morphed into something noxious and ugly. And that was before I went back and saw the wilted titum arum.
I said I was going back to peer at the old books, but I made for the stinky flower right away and while I spent time with the books, I also spent much time just sitting in the garden.
Our Stinky Flower had previously bloomed in 1999 and an offset seedling from that plant gave rise to a new plant that bloomed at the Huntington in 2009 and again in 2010.
Then last week, as depression lapped around my edges, I came across the Post article. Amorphophallus titanum had come back into my life. Things are greatly changed. I am far from the Huntington. Leo is as tall as the spadex of our Stinky Flower, an adult and very much his own person, but then he always has been. He did not follow through on those early biology interests. He’s more of a troubadour. What hasn’t changed is that, what Churchill called the Black Dog, is still dogging some of us.
Well, so be it. The Stinky Flower has its own amazing beauty and its stink can be endured.
I am reblogging from Memories are Made of This because this tree reminds me of trees I have seen in Greece although it is no where near there.
Nature is amazing. The will to survive is very strong.
I noticed that in this tree as we drove a past a paddock in New Zealand.
What had happened to it? Had it been struck by lightning? Maybe a long ago fire had swept through this area or maybe rot had started to set in.
But whatever the reason it certainly was not going to just lie down and give up…
They are beautiful in their peace,
they are wise in their silence.
They will stand after we are dust.
They teach us, and we tend them.
Galeain ip Altiem MacDunelmor
I have borrowed the title of Amy Tan’s book, The Opposite of Fate as a focus through which to consider the week’s events, public and personal. This non-fiction book is a series of musings, leaning toward autobiography, in which the Chinese-American writer posits hope as fate’s opposite, according to The Penguin reader’s guide. As I recall, however, the opposite of fate is destiny: fate is something imposed, whereas destiny involves conscious choice. Some cultures, including Tan’s parents’ culture, believe in fate. Some, like the Greek culture, are even called fatalistic. Certainly, the idea of destiny involves more optimism. We don’t like to think of ourselves as being ground down by the gods, anymore than we like to admit that life is just a series of random events. We crave meaning as a way to survive.
Thornton Wilder in his 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, takes a fictional event, the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in 1714, as the starting point from which to examine the idea of fate. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, researches the lives of those who died in the collapse in order to see whether there is “direction and meaning in our lives beyond the individual’s own will”. He produces a large book and, for his pains, he and his book are burned in the public square. Wilder formulates a clear question but leaves the reader to decide the answer.
That question occurred to me as I listened to the 6 o’clock news last Monday, where the bombing of the Boston marathon was reported. Sifting quickly through fate and destiny, I arrived at random chance. Random chance can, of course, lead those so inclined to postulate that such things are tests and it is the way we respond to them that matters. On the off chance that is so, I resolved not be terrorized and demoralized. Living in a relatively terror-free city helped, as did Friday’s manhunt in Watertown and its positive outcome. But the agonizing puzzle remained.
In the very early hours of Tuesday morning, a member of my extended family passed away at the age of 104. He was a distant in-law, long since divorced, but still a part of the lives of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, my nieces and nephews. They visited him on his birthday and holidays. I had seen the photos of the family gatherings on fridge doors but, until then, I hadn’t really thought about his advanced age. He was 27 years older than I am now, lucky double 7. He was older than either of my parents would be if they were alive. He had outlived my grandmother, who died at 96, a mere 19 years older than I am now. I was still doing the math when a friend phoned to ask me when I had last seen Sally S. A week ago, on Friday, I thought. The caller had seen her on Sunday and so, comparing our answers and others, her daughters arrived, forensically, at her death date, Tuesday April 16th. Unable to contact her, they had found her in her bed on Thursday. She had apparently died on the same night as the 104 year-old, but there the similarity ended. She was 74. Personally, I’m inclined to go with Sally’s choice, if choice it was. I lack the oldster’s courage.
Meanwhile, I was knocking about asking why. Why did the ancient grandpa live so long?
My grandmother used to ask why she was still alive when she was only 85. Her husband had died 15 years before, but he still turned up in her dreams, telling her, for example, that the potatoes in the woodshed had sprouted blossoms and needed to be put in the ground. She still lived in their farmhouse, out of sight of the next house, surrounded by fields, pasture and woods and without transportation. Selfishly, I assured her, when she asked, that she was the center of the family and that her many grandchildren depended on that. Toward the end, she went to live in a nursing home where the staff was French and she was addressed not by her husband’s last name, which she had had for 78 years by then, but by her maiden name. Her question became ever more valid, but she was too muddled to ask it.
Do we come here with our own scripts and requirements, plans for what we need to do and possible exit dates? My Aunt Mae thought so and she thought there were several possible exit strategies, which we can choose depending on how complete our mission is or how consciously we are living. Did she mean we can avoid fate if we fulfill destiny? I know that she thought a child’s death did not mean a wasted life.
In answer to the question, why did the 104 year-old live so long, someone answered that it was just divinity wanting to experience itself as a very old man.
That darned divinity, I thought, always such a mystery.
It’s tempting this morning, the day after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, to sink into despair, to tighten up in fear. Just what the terrorists had in mind.
So what is my responsibility at this moment?
Of all the images that have burned into my mind, I need to chose the image of people “running toward the fire”, the people tearing down the barriers to get to the wounded. There were many more helpers there than destroyers – bystanders, marathon workers, police, soldiers, security staff, medics, nurses, doctors, hospital staff. There were those who documented events and brought what they witnessed to us.
And yet, the overwhelming pity we feel for the victims’ pain and loss threatens to outweigh the good. They are in the thick of it, but most of us are not. I am not. I have distance. My job is not to add to the thought-form of terror and despair. What I need to do today is not just to “keep calm and carry on”, but to focus on goodness and light, not in some airy-fairy new age way but at a very concrete level. I, personally, can do that by remembering how parents and uncles and aunts and teachers and all the others who “run toward the fire”, outnumber and more than balance the deluded bombers. I cannot and never could afford to give in to terrorism.
What works for me isn’t necessarily going to work for someone else. You may use some other method of restoring your positive outlook. It might be compassion or faith in God or something else. Feel free to share it.
A remarkable place that I saw years ago. It is accessible at low tide.
From his series ‘Still’ – a beautiful photograph of Mont Saint-Michel, documenting the stillness and serenity of water by Hungarian photographer Akos Major / Mont Saint-Michel is a rocky tidal island 247 acres in size, and is a commune in Normandy, France. It is located approximately one kilometre off the country’s northwestern coast, at the mouth of the Couesnon River near Avranches.
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April Crocus in the Rain
Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales with a jaunty tribute to April:
When that Aprill with his shoures soote
The draught of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which virtue engendered is the flour
……
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
When April with his sweet showers has pierced to the root what March dried up and bathed every vein in such moisture… then people long to go on pilgrimages (chiefly of course to Canterbury.)
And so a knight, his young squire, a yeoman, a prioress, a nun, a monk, a friar, a merchant, a clerk, and a dozen others, including the Good Wyf besyde Bathe set out on horseback to pray to “the blisful martir”, St Thomas Becket. On their way, they pass the time by telling each other stories, some chivalric, some edifying and some downright raunchy.
Prologue-The Canterbury Tales by Lucille Gilling
T.S. Eliot, on the other hand lamented in “The Waste Land”
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Sounds a bit negative but then, this part of the poem is called “The Burial of the Dead”. Eliot felt that life, devoid of meaning, is death, while death, if sacrificial, is life-giving.
Vernon Duke, songwriter, celebrated April and Paris:
April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom,
Holiday tables under the trees,
April in Paris, this is a feeling,
No one can ever reprise.
Lucky Paris! The chestnuts in my town won’t bloom until the end of May.
William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 and died on April 23, 1616. He said, “Men are April when they woo and December when they wed.” His was a shot-gun wedding to an older woman.
Same ingredients, different cakes!
What do you make of April?
(If you plan to read The Dinner and you hate any kind of spoiler, walk on by. But if you don’t mind knowing a little, read on.)
A week or so ago, I got bent out of shape by the ending of Jo Nesbo’s The Phantom (115journals.com -Is this the end of Harry Hole?) This week it’s Herman Koch’s The Dinner, which has recently been translated from Dutch and published in English and has, from all reports, become a runaway best seller. In the first case, my reaction arose out of affection. Not so, with The Dinner.
The newspapers I get were coy in their reviews. One review in the National Post, recommended that potential readers should read nothing about the book, not even that review. Apparently, there was a surprise that we should not spoil. As I later found out other reviewers were more straight-forward, even allowing that Koch was true to his usual depiction of humanity. I wish I had read them first or had some prior knowledge of Koch’s other work. What I wanted badly when I finished was someone to talk to about the book. So far, I haven’t found anyone.
You’re it, I guess.
A reviewer for the Toronto Star called the narrator, Paul Lohman, “fairly reliable”. Excuse me? It is true that initially, I assumed the narrator and I had some opinions in common, a distaste for contemporary food pornography for one. The novel’s action is set in an upscale Amsterdam restaurant and each section is titled after a dinner course, ‘Aperitif’, ‘Appetizer’, all the way to ‘Digestif’. Reviews tend to quote the same sentence to illustrate what Paul (and I/we) disdain: the maitre d’ points with a bent pinkie finger and says, “The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil with rocket…the sun dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.” (Alan Preston: The Observer) Makes you remember when your mother told you about the little children starving in China. In spite of the initial “civilized” opinions with which the reader can agree, it soon becomes evident that Paul is not as he portrays himself. As a history teacher, he has been placed on the non-active list. And, under stress, he is not to be trusted around a burning pan.
Two couples, Paul and his wife, Claire, and his brother, Serge and his wife, Babette, have met for dinner to discuss an extremely serious family matter. The only reason they have been able to get a last minute table at this exclusive restaurant is that Serge is a political rock star, about to be elected prime minister. According to Paul, Serge is a hypocrite, an egotist, a man without taste in food or holiday home. Certainly it would appear that Serge has used very bad judgement in locating this sensitive discussion in such a public venue, but I suppose, both families are trying to avoid their 15 year-old sons who are the subject of the discussion. A first person narrator requires the reader to agree to see events through that narrator’s eyes and this gets creepier and creepier as the novel moves on.
Suppose you are a parent. Suppose your child has done something morally wrong. How do you handle it? Do you consider your primary loyalty to lie with your family unit or do you take the wider human family into account? Do you consider the impact on your child’s future education and career or do you consider it necessary to right a wrong?
Once upon a time, my 7 year-old son pocketed his friend’s dinky toy at show-and-tell. He showed it to me saying his friend had given it to him. I questioned the culprit briefly and marched him to his friend’s door where son returned the toy and said sorry. I didn’t even wait to ask Dad his opinion. In my opinion, that was my son’s education. But of course, I am not labouring under Paul’s difficulty, an unnamed genetically caused anger-management issue. A number of reviewers thought that weakened Koch’s examination of our present day tendency to violence.
So what am I saying? Am I disgruntled that a whole book is taken up with a fruitless discussion of the sort of problem I think most parents would resolve in a heartbeat? Well, even I might have needed a few heartbeats given the viciousness of this deed. But what kind of people handle things as Paul and Claire do in the end? Is this what we have become?
Serge has his own idea with which the other three do not agree. While it is indeed better, he might have been more persuasive – he is a politician after all – and he pays a terrible price. Let’s just say that this is the last time he will get a table at this swanky restaurant and that will be the least of his problems. There is no nemesis, no natural justice, no neatly tied up ends in The Dinner. The female of the species turns out to be more monstrous than the male and their 15 year-old son is bound to become a monster of an entirely different order.
*****
I need to note that I felt compassion as I made my 7 year-old return the purloined toy. It was humiliating for him. But one of his best qualities now is his integrity.
For an update about the movie see https://115journals.com/2013/09/16/guess-what-came-up-at-dinner-update-on-kochs-the-dinner/
115 journals 