A Brief Time Out

Dear blog friends, my husband and I had to have our dog euthanized last Saturday. I will not be posting for a few days. Please come back next week.

Thank you.

Book Review, Claude and Camille, A Novel of Monet

To read this gem of a novel is like entering an Impressionist painting and becoming immersed in its vibrant colors, glistening hilights, and hidden shadows. As a love story, it traces the arc of Claude Monet's life-long passion for Camille Doncieux, the woman who was his sweetheart, his muse, the mother of his two children, and, later, his wife.

The author, Stephanie Cowell

But Claude and Camille also captures the love of art that drives artists to pawn their few possessions for tubes of paint, borrow repeatedly from friends and relatives to stave off creditors, suffer repeated evictions from lodgings, stay outside all day in freezing temperatures in order to capture the play of light on waves or snow covered fields.

In his early painting days, Claude and his friend Fédéric Bazille share a studio in Paris that quickly becomes the hub of activity for several artist friends, among them, Renoir, Pissarro, Cezanne, Degas. All the young painters are filled with visions of a new way of painting. The future seems promising, despite the fact that most of them are in debt. Almost all of them are artists against family wishes: Claude's father wants him to take over his nautical supplies shop in Le Havre. Bazille's family wants him to become a doctor.

Claude first sees Camille in a train station in Paris. Arrested by her  beauty, he makes a quick sketch of her before she vanishes. Then he comes across her by accident in her uncle's bookshop four years later. It seems destiny. Accepting his invitation to pose for a painting, Camille brings her sister to Fontainebleau as a chaperone. Later, in Paris, Camille poses again for Claude, and the portrait is accepted by the Salon in the Palais de l'Industrie. When he takes her to see the exhibit, convent-educated Camille decides she's in love with him and leaves her family and her fiancé to become Claude's lover and the darling of his circle of friends.

But Camille—Minou to friends and family—is a bundle of mysteries and contradictions: She wants to go on stage. She wants to write a novel. She wants to have lots of children. She has moods. A devoted muse and passionate lover, Camille's life centers around Claude. Or does it? Her own mother whispers to Claude in one scene, "There are things you don't yet understand about our Minou . . ."

This book was so good, I read it twice. The author's rendering of the Impressionists' world reflects her thorough research. Characters and settings come alive. The lives that unfold are entirely believable. This is a must read for history lovers, art lovers and anyone who just likes a good story.

You can order this book at:
Random House
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

For more information about Stephanie Cowell and her other books,
visit the author's website:

You can also contact her at:
https://www.facebook.com/stephanie.cowell.14
stephaniecowell@nyc.rr.com



How about you? Do you have a favorite novel you've read more than once? Do you like fiction based on famous figures in history? (Share titles, please!)

Robert Louis Stevenson, A World Soul

I've been thinking lately about Robert Louis Stevenson, or, as he is often referred to, RLS. Born in Scotland (a land he never stopped loving), he transcended culture and geography: He loved France; in the USA, California boasts tourists sites where he and his wife lived; and he ended his days in Samoa.

 As a child, I loved his poetry collection for children,  A Child's Garden of Verses, and for many years I thought his poetry was mainly for children. But his poetry for adults was appreciated, too. Familiar lines shine in anthologies:

" Home is the sailor, home from sea,/ And the hunter home from the hill."

"Gather ye roses while ye may . . ."

Religious as a child, a rebel as an adult, always deeply philosophical, he was a writer with an unusually wide range in the Victorian Era in which he lived: poetry, short stories, essays, novels, adventure tales—he wrote whatever he wished, and couldn't be pigeon-holed. You can see the independence in his face, the determination to think things out for himself and then perservere until an idea, a plot, a book, is carried out to its conclusion.

For a man with serious ill health all his life, he managed to have more adventures than many healthier people could ever dream of. He traveled. He was married the woman of his dreams (Fanny Osbourne), a divorced woman with grown children. (He collaborated on several books with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.) He traveled to the continent and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to America, traveled overland by stage coach to California, and ended up in a South Sea paradise, revered by the locals.

Fanny Osbourne, who
also looks like she had
a mind of her own.

Note: Both these photos are in the public domain in the U.S. 


This morning I finished reading for a second time, Treasure Island, an absolutely brilliant book. It's no more bloodthirsty than the slew of popular YAs published today, and it's a fast-paced read from beginning to end. I won't be a spoiler here and give away the ending for those who haven't read it, but, trust me: the ending was perfect. Stevenson's wife, Fanny, may not have liked the book, but 130 years ago this man knew how to begin a tale and end it with no let-up of suspense. I have to think that pirate ships were the original dystopian universes—worlds in disarray peopled with complex characters, all with their own backstories, offering great opportunities for heroism and malfeasance.

I've read that Stevenson achieved more and more mastery over his writing and that his surprising death caught him mid-sentence while writing the novel that would have become his greatest book, Weir of Hermiston (an event that sounds like every writer's nightmare). But the world is far richer for all the books he wrote on the way to his unfinished masterpiece.

You can read a full biography here and a great resource site can be found here . There is also a rather dated, but good, children's biography of Stevenson, by Forbes Macgregor, ISBN 0-7117-0320-5, put out in 1989 by Jarrold Colour Publications in Great Britain.

How about you? Have you read any of RSL's books? If so, which one is your favorite?

I DISCOVER TENNYSON: PART II

For the past month, while working on a rewrite of my middle grade historical mystery, I've been indulging my new found love of Tennyson's poetry. A great discovery for me is In Memoriam, a book-length elegy which is really a series of elegies in 131 poems, to his friend, Arthur Hallam, along with a prologue and an epilogue in verse.

Tennyson met Hallam at Trinity College in Cambridge and they became fast friends. When Hallam unexpectedly died of apoplexy on a trip to Europe with his father, the death deeply affected Tennyson's family. Hallam was engaged to Alfred's sister, Emily, and Alfred lost his closest friend. Devastated, Tennyson began writing the poems as a way to cope with his grief.

But the poems evolved into more than elegies to a lost life. Tennyson wrote them over a period of seventeen years. During that time, he was wrestling with scientific discoveries of the day—discoveries that presented challenges to one's Christian faith, something the Victorians took quite seriously. Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr., calls In Memoriam, "that monument to the religious questioning of the nineteenth century . . ."1.  T. S. Eliot called it a religious poem and wrote, "It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt." 2. 

Through the successive elegies, Tennyson worked through questions of whether the soul persists after death, whether there can be a loving creator if the creations simply become buried under geological strata through the ages, whether evolution suggests man is higher on the evolutionary scale, whether the future will usher in a superior being to man as we know him now, and so on. Tennyson finally made his peace by recognizing the validity of scientific reality in Nature, and the validity of spiritual reality in God, deciding that they worked by different laws.

Because In Memoriam addressed concerns of the Victorian Age at so many levels—including the Victorian attitude toward mourning—it was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1850. Soon after, Tennyson became England's new poet laureate. (Wordsworth had passed away, Queen Victoria was looking for a successor, and Prince Albert read In Memoriam and admired it.) 3. In later years, after the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria told Tennyson, "Next to the Bible in Memoriam is my comfort." 4. 

The success of In Memoriam brought financial security and enabled Tennyson to wed his long-time sweetheart, Emily Sellwood. 

As I've been reading through the poems, I was amazed at how many famous lines I recognized: 

"Tis better to have loved and lost/ than never to have loved at all."

"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky/ . . . Ring out the old, Ring in the new . . ."

"Our little systems have their day; / They have their day and cease to be . . ." 

"Theirs is not to reason why, / Theirs is but to do and die . . ."

"Nature, red in tooth and claw . . . "

Some of the above information has been taken from a fine biography of Tennyson at Poetry Foundation HERE, and some (including the four foot-noted quotes) has been taken from a book I would highly recommend:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
Authoritative Text, Criticism
Second Edition
Edited by Erik Gray, Harvard University
W. W. Norton & Company, 2004
1. p. 110
2. p. 138
3. p. xiii
4. p. xiii

Time Out For Another Week Until I Finish My Re-Write

Dear Blog Friends,

Please excuse my being remiss in posting. I'm finishing up a re-write and should be done next week.

Please come back after April 23rd. Thanks.


OOPS! A LITTLE BIT LONGER, AFTER ALL. I SHOULD BE FINISHED MAY 15TH. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE.

I DISCOVER TENNYSON: PART I

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Lady of Shalott -- Painted by John William Waterhouse in1888

I fell in love with poetry in my teens. But poems had to be short: Yeats’s wandering Aengus, searching for the spirit who had called his name so they could pluck the golden apples of the sun. Wordsworth’s golden daffodils dancing in the breeze . . . (I liked Victorian poets even then.)

The poems had to be short so I could copy them into my poetry notebook and draw butterflies and flowers around them. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” inspired polite page flipping, as did “The Lotus-Eaters” and Idylls of the King. Early on I decided I didn’t like Tennyson—which has always amazed my husband: He read Morte d’Arthur in high school and still finds it wonderful. But back then, I thought Tennyson's poems were much too long.

It took a thirteen-year-old Victorian girl make me discover Tennyson—a character in the middle grade mystery series I’m writing. For some reason, she likes Alfred, LordTennyson. (Characters have a way of letting you know things like that.) I was surprised. I knew that L. M. Montgomery’s Anne in Anne of Green Gables liked Tennyson so much she and her friends acted out “The Lady of Shalott”. But my character? What was the poet's appeal for these young girls of yesteryear? I had to find out.

My husband recommended Morte d’Arthur, so I started with that. Was it only a week ago? I’m entranced: The soul-stirring lines. The sheer music in Tennyson’s poems, whether they rhyme or not. And when they do rhyme, the rhyme doesn’t feel forced. His verses flow so easily, and seem straight from the heart. And the stories they tell! I’ve been going through every poetry book on our shelves and online, finding more Tennyson, drowning in the beauty of his poetry. I’m hooked. I’m besotted!

I also have been reading biographical selections about Tennyson, and I’ll be going into his life a little in Part II. But for today, I leave you with an excerpt from Tennyson’s four-part poem, “The Lady of Shalott". (The full poem can be read at The Poetry Foundation's site HERE.)

A big thank you, too, to Jayne Ferst at A Novice Novelist for mentioning the Pre-Raphaelites art movement. The beautiful painting of The Lady of Shalott you see above was painted by John William Waterhouse in1888, a Pre-Raphaelite artist.

The excerpt, then: Enjoy! And, tell me: Has one of your characters ever made you discover a new author or artist? Who? What about a hobby or some other discovery? 

Part I

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro' the field the road runs by

       To many-tower'd Camelot;

And up and down the people go,

Gazing where the lilies blow

Round an island there below,

       The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Thro' the wave that runs for ever

By the island in the river

       Flowing down to Camelot.

Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

       The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow veil'd,

Slide the heavy barges trail'd

By slow horses; and unhail'd

The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd

       Skimming down to Camelot:

But who hath seen her wave her hand?

Or at the casement seen her stand?

Or is she known in all the land,

       The Lady of Shalott?

Only reapers, reaping early

In among the bearded barley,

Hear a song that echoes cheerly

From the river winding clearly,

       Down to tower'd Camelot:

And by the moon the reaper weary,

Piling sheaves in uplands airy,

Listening, whispers " 'Tis the fairy

       Lady of Shalott."

Dappled Things

Irises in Monet's Garden

Olive Trees in Bordighera

The flowering plum trees and cherry trees around town have shed their petals, scattering them on sidewalks like confetti. Now green leaves are unfurling; flowers uncurling. Spring has come to Sacramento, and with it the play of light and shadow dapples the streets. As I walk in Midtown, the lines of one of my favorite poems come to mind: “Pied Beauty”, by the Victoria poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

        

Glory be to God for dappled things,

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

            Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pierced—fold, fallow, and plough;

           And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                          Praise him.*

I’ve always loved the splash of his words. And even though Hopkins suffered periods of despair during his short life, (short by today’s standards) this poem, written in 1877, overflows with a kindliness of spirit that must have always bubbled within. (You can read a deeper analysis of it HERE.)  

And I've loved the "splashes" of beauty in an Impressionist painting. Four years before Hopkins wrote this poem, across the Channel, in in the Nadar studio in Paris, a group of painters gave the first of eight exhibitions (1874-1886) that earned their independent styles the name of “Impressionism.” Impressionism emphasized the play of light and shadow. To capture it, they painted en plein air, “in the open air”. In fact, if you look at the paintings above by Monet, a towering figure in the group who inspired them all and kept them from giving up,** you can think of the technique as a dappling of light and color. A Monet painting is a pied beauty. A painting by any of the Impressionists is a dappled beauty. 

Each of them went their own way with the technique, of course, as any artist must. But all of the Impressionists left paintings dappled with color-saturated light. (You can see a complete list of the Impressionists HERE.) Whatever course their later individual styles took, each of them, like Hopkins, saw the world and left a response “whose beauty is past change.”

How about you? Do any of the impressionist painters affect you this way? If so, which one? Do you have a favorite Hopkins poem? Which one? Can you recommend another painter or poet whose work is a "pied beauty"? If so, please share.

  

       

*The Oxford Book of Short Poems, Chosen and Edited by P. J. Kavanagh and James Michie,           

Oxford University Press, 1987

**The Impressionists, Text by Pierre Courthion, Translation by John Shepley, Special Limited Edition by Rēalitēs USA Pubications, Inc., 1980