38. Heroines: New Film and Book reviews by Sandy
Because of the pandemic lockdown here in New York City, Louise Ebersdorf (our heroine-hostess) has insisted that Cheryl and I remain in her Ebersdorf Tower for the interim, even though we are not doing all that much new work in her on-site dance studio. We have joined Pippa, Madame Sesostris, and Belle as co-residents. The building superviser, Mr. Pessoa, safely funnels food and supplies to us, and our Master (Raro) goes downstairs to pick them up for distribution. I haven’t had a chance to rehearse him in our new solo dance recently, but time may indeed offer opportunities. It looks like our premiere for the solo in a local gallery space has to be postponed. (All Master commented to me was, “What a bummer!”) Even its rehearsal here depends on the moods of Albertine and Paco in the pet laboratory and their use of the adjacent dance studio to keep the pair’s feline ensemble (all twenty-one healthy creatures) in rehearsal toward a performance-art premiere. (I, of course, think of it as the Animal Act.) It looks to me like A&P’s planned booking in the MoMA performance space may not happen because of the coronaviral threat. The Museum is currently closed. Albertine must be in a state!
Cheryl and I now plan ahead, when possible. She hears that Madame Beach is still in Siberia, looking for “Denisovan” ballerinas for the Parisian ballet company, Le Swing. The two haven’t had a Zoom session for a while, but Cheryl has been looking at films recommended by Liane in search of balletic themes. Louise and Liane are still unable to resolve which one will get the exclusive choreographic services of Cheryl and myself. All that is simmering away. Until these matters are resolved, Cheryl and I are doing catch-up reading, especially since all the theaters in town are closed.
Louise tells me that what I need is a heroine. She recommended two films on Joan of Arc by the French director Bruno Dumont: Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, originally released in 2017, and Joan of Arc, just screened at the Lincoln Center French film series (before the lights went out). In Jeannette, we see the eight-year-old peasant maid receiving her angelic brief to defend the French against the English in the One Hundred Years War. Two young actresses play the girl: Lisa Leplat Prudhomme is Jeannette; and Jeanne Voisin plays the slightly older child. The first movie ends as Jeannette rides out of her village to announce her destined role to Charles VII and his army. Dumont’s screenplay has been adapted from dramas by the poet-philosopher Charles Péguy.
The film uses a musical score by IGORR (Gautier Serre), a French heavy-metal composer, working here in styles closer to Renaissance and Baroque church music. The combination of such disparate modes works for my ear. The most moving moments in the film are the evocation of the child’s discovery of her three angelic inspirations – Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine – levitating above a countryside brook in the early morning air. These visions are costumed and posed after their likenesses in glowing cathedral windows, and we are able to see them through a child’s eyes thanks to Dumont’s directorial simplicity and restraint. The film can be deeply touching at such moments. There is a sense in which Dumont is paying homage to Robert Bresson, the obvious tribute being to Diary of a Country Priest. Simplicity of statement can accomplish so much. I am thinking, also, of the recent Italian movie by Alice Rohrwacher, Happy Like Lazzaro, which had its Bressonian moments.
The second film, Joan of Arc, takes up the story as Joan, in armor amid the sand dunes on the coast of Normandy, awaits the call to military action. Interestingly, Dumont avoids showing any subsequent conflict itself. In the place of battles, he stages an elaborate equestrian ballet. Joan trains her horse-backed troops in intricately choreographed patterns, the spectacle shot from above (perhaps with a drone camera?). Later, when the English enemy manages to capture Joan, we do not see the kidnapping. Instead, we observe Joan’s warhorse lost in the woods, heavily lamenting the absence of its rider. Dumont has the animal come right toward his camera, confused and sweaty. You can feel that you have never seen a creature in this state before, at least not on film. There is something almost other-worldly about such naked animal distress. Perhaps Dumont was inspired by Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar. Again, the simplest of masterstrokes.
The bulk of the new movie is devoted to the trial of Joan before the English churchmen. Joan is played again by Prudhomme, now about ten years old and even more an extraordinary child actress. There is a heart-stopping moment when Joan is led into yet another interrogation before her accusers and her infant height contrasts with the tall adult soldiers before and after her. Dumont is relatively restrained in depicting the inquisitional churchmen as grotesques. Perhaps a child’s eyes would indeed see them as his caricatures. Once again, modern music (six composers) is used to powerful effect. There is one countertenor aria about the fires of hell awaiting the girl that will give you goosebumps.
Dumont’s film is very much about a modern conception of the individual conscience embattled and in need of vigilant defense. The young Joan musters a self-justification against great odds. We are reminded of the maid’s unearthly precocity. Her immolation is – in contrast – an afterthought here. The director has dramatized an interior conflict rather than an historical atrocity. Cheryl must see these two films. I think she will be fascinated. And perhaps inspired. I now want to re-see the Carl Dreyer Passion.
My main recent inspiration has derived from a reading of the letters of the late Elizabeth Hardwick in the new book The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Louise passed it along to me. (She claims a spiritual kinship with this writer through her own marital history.) The book documents the final rift between Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, after more than two decades of marriage and the birth of their daughter, Harriet. Lowell suffered from a debilitating manic-depressive syndrome which sometimes institutionalized him, and the frequent manic periods often coincided with brief affairs with various women, a situation that Hardwick was accustomed to handling even to the extent of forgiveness of the wayward poet. In 1970, the situation changed when he fell in love with Caroline Blackwood during a year serving a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford. Hardwick’s eloquent appeals to Lowell to come to his senses were disregarded. The new association led to Hardwick eventually starting divorce proceedings. (She was Lowell’s second wife; he had previously been married to the novelist Jean Stafford.)
The central subject of this publication of letters between Hardwick and Lowell involves his decision to incorporate prose from his wife’s private letters to him, dealing with their marital breakup, into newly written poems. These works chronicled the husband’s flight from his marriage and his new life with Blackwood. Lowell did not deign to obtain permission from Hardwick for the exploitation of her epistolary writings; neither did he allow her to see the accomplished result in advance of publication. In addition, Lowell thought he had the right to change the wording she had used in her letters. Hardwick claimed that this act “hurt” her as much as anything in her life. But such was her sense of duty to “Cal” and so inured to forgiving him out of respect and love, Hardwick ultimately established another kind of friendship with Lowell after their separation, including the period that saw the eventual end of the poet’s relation to Blackwood and the end of his life. Hardwick’s side of the correspondence -- from which Lowell derived his use of her words -- was not made available to her during her life. Lowell’s poetry was published despite Hardwick’s objections. Only now has her side of the original correspondence been made public in The Dolphin Letters volume. We follow the story of the breakup through the exchange of letters between husband and wife and between them and their friends and colleagues. We see where artistic appropriation can lead.
Hardwick was a widely respected novelist, short story writer and critic during the decades of her marriage to Lowell. Lowell himself was admired as a leading American poet, translator-adaptor, and dramatist. I have to confess that Lowell’s poetry has never sent a chill down my spine. Even before reading The Dolphin Letters, I had Lowell pegged as the Prince of Appropriation – historical and literary allusions clot his verse, making endless claims for intellectual ancestries. The verse has little rapture of its own – or, rather, it is unable to attain any true rhapsodic ambition. I’m afraid some of it reads like a kind of second-rate and highly pretentious poetic prose. On the other hand, I am willing to believe that Lowell the man must have been socially charismatic – attractive to women, witty, educated, alert to various literary fashions. You can intuit how certain women would cleave to him. And then perhaps discover how heavily his hand delivered judgments, including on himself. Lowell was ever in search of an authentic self. Even his poetic persona had to be sacrificed to that end. His art paid the high cost.
What the new collection of letters between husband and wife (and with their friends, including Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and Mary McCarthy) makes clear is the good sense, artistic integrity, and fine-tuned moral conscience of Hardwick. Instead of collapsing under the public and personal crisis, Hardwick found a way to flourish. She remained very much a part of New York social life. She took the education of her daughter Harriet seriously. She attended to domestic money matters and taught at Barnard to make ends meet. She traveled and gave lectures.
The volume of correspondence reveals Lowell’s and Hardwick’s most valued friendships. There is a wonderful series of exchanges with Mary McCarthy, including a footnote in which she and Hardwick tussle over a punctuation crux in the Henry James story “In the Cage”. And Lowell’s decision to “adapt” Hardwick’s prose for his new poems inspired the poet Elizabeth Bishop to upbraid him unforgettably and even insist that “art just isn’t worth that much”. What an extraordinary letter! We should all have such friends.
As Hardwick writes early on to McCarthy: “. . . one cannot win with Cal.” The poet she had married could find a justification for his conduct through loyalty to his work and to his self-identification as an artist. Nothing could compete with such a standard and his desperate need for identity. Somehow this has an arch-Romantic quality: the “artist-sage” crucified upon his Super-Self, after Isaiah Berlin. In the meantime, Hardwick not only organized the disbursement and selling of Lowell’s literary papers while he was in England with his new love; she oversaw his complicated tax situation in the States. Greater love hath no wife.
One benefit of the documented relationship between these two writers is that the reader of The Dolphin Letters overhears the dialogue of two intelligent American literary minds in various moods. We find Hardwick turning to Dvorak because, as she puts it, for that moment she likes “rather second string romantic things”. You overhear Lowell recommending R. P. Blackmur’s “strange grace of style forever troubled and cleared”. Both parties reveal positions on the revived women’s liberation movement – Hardwick amused, Lowell critical.
You encounter the patriarchal rights a Lowell assumes he is entitled to from Day One. It is as though Adam must arrange to have Eve reabsorbed into his body to form that missing rib: appropriation in reverse. This book of letters provides all women with further evidence of a basic imbalance in society’s roles for the genders. Here is how women (and many gay men) are forced to see male partners-in-life -- through a governing absence of equality. It is Hardwick’s sense of a living balance beyond personal injury and public shame that delivers the evidence. I now want to read more of her writings, both fiction and non-fiction. Hardwick writes with a light, lucid touch. She delivers her most devastating judgments between the lines. Hardwick’s writing “self” is that assured. Her criticism transcends the journalistic.
I have always wanted to do a solo (or solos) for a ballerina to the “Consolations” of Franz Liszt. Perhaps Joan the Maid could be the unifying theme. And Hardwick’s epistolary self-portrait gives us all a model for our conduct in private and public adversity. Such heroines we do not forget.
S.
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