Enid Bagnold and the Origins of National Velvet; How Close is Too Close For a Writer--Part Two.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

National Velvet, Enid Bagnold and the Butchers of Rottingdean--How Close Is Too Close When You're Writing From Life

Nobody grownup seems to read National Velvet. Take my word for it. This is not a children's book. It's a fairy tale, yes, but it's also a brilliant and deeply observed book about a very real family: that of Araminty and her husband, Mr. Brown (the parents call one another Mr. and Mrs. Brown even in moments of great tenderness) and their five children. The three older girls are, "Like golden greyhounds," Velvet, at fourteen, is described as "a sapling Dante," while their four-year-old son, Donald, carts around his "spit bottle," and worries about "Stinking ants." 

The family also includes their dogs--the nameless "black barking dog on a string," that nobody in the house hears anymore, and who occasionally lunging himself senseless; the three yard spaniels, thin and golden like the three older daughters, leaning against the "groaning" door, longing to get in; and Jacob, the fox terrier, growing stout in middle age, obsequious and fawning, and who trots from person to person at the table. "The Browns loved Jacob as they loved each other, deeply, from the back of the soul, with intolerance in daily life." 

And then there's Mi, the son of the only man who knows what Araminty is really made of, "embedded in fat, her keen, hooded eyes hardly lifting the rolls above them." For Araminty once swam the channel and Mi's father was the man who trained her to do so. 


Father is the butcher, with a shop and slaughterhouse (the latter sharing a wall with the house.) Mother does the books and cooks the remnants left over when the fancy meat is sold. 

And here's where we get into the "How close is too close?"

Enid Bagnold. 

According to Michael Thornton, the film and theatrical reviewer who was befriended by Bagnold when he was seven and she in her fifties,  National Velvet's publication in 1937, "created an uproar in Rottingdean. The village butchers, the Hilders, contended that they were cruelly caricatured as the Brown family in the novel. Their daughter Winnie and her three siblings had clearly served as models for the characters of the heroine, Velvet Brown, and her sisters. Everyone in Rottingdean knew that the family’s matriarch, Mrs Hilder, had been an exceptional swimmer in her day. She was incensed to find herself portrayed as Mrs Brown, who she saw as a bossy, over-large matron rather than the powerful woman Bagnold wrote. 

To add insult to injury, Enid did not even buy her meat from them, but got her joints at Sainsbury’s in Brighton. The Hollywood film nine years later, which elevated Elizabeth Taylor to stardom, made Enid’s success international and the Hilders even more resentful.

I adore the Browns, especially Araminty. She "cooked admirably, ran the accounts, watched the shop, looked after the till, spoke seldom, interfered hardly ever, sighed sometimes, (because it would have taken a war on her home soil, the birth of a colony, or a great cataclysm to have dug from her what she was born for,) moved about the house, brought up her four taut daughters under her heavy eye and thought about death occasionally with a kind of sardonic shrug. Ed(wina) Malvina and Meredith behaved themselves at the wink of one of her heavy eyes. Velvet would have laid down her stringy life for her." 

Enid Bagnold in WWI

I would, too. 

And yes, Mrs. Hilders hated the way she was presented. Should Enid Bagnold have changed the family, made them unrecognizable? The girls in the novel are Edwina, Malvolia and Meredith. In real life, the girls, born in 1897, 1899 and 1900, were (I believe) named Winnie, Minnie and Matilda.  Should Enid have turned these the three older daughters, "all alike, like golden greyhounds," into three boys, thus losing the dynamic of four girls in a row, not to mention, "their golden hair was sleek, their fine faces like antelopes, their shoulders still and steady, like Zulu women carrying water, and their bodies beneath the shoulders rippling when they moved." Personally, I'd be hard put to say she should have. 

Bagnold married Sir Roderick Jones, the head of Reuters, and a wealthy man. They had four children and a large household with several servants to manage, or try to manage. Mi Taylor is likely based on McHardy, a former jockey with a mysterious past, who taught the four youngsters to ride. Bagnold's daughter, now "Laurian, Countess of Harcourt," was the horse mad girl who inspired the novel and who also provided the line drawings of horses that illustrate the original book. “I was able to practise my riding so much because I had a governess and a lot of time.’’ And because she had McHardy. 

   

McHardy slept, by choice, in a loose box and, according to Bagnold, reinvented the Joneses as a “horsebox family”, so they toured gymkhanas countrywide. Bagnold once claimed that for the 10 years McHardy was with the family he was “more important than a governess: more important than a mother”. It was his racing background that informed the book’s narrative. (His character, Mi Taylor, was played by Mickey Rooney in the film, with no attempt at an accent. At least McHardy never seems to have objected to his character, in either novel or film. 


fouhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/31/biography.theatre

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/06/national-velvet-enid-bagnold-rereading

Reposting from obsolete blog. How Close Is Too Close In Writing. Part One.

 Welp, I can't get into an old blog, so I'm going to repost what I liked best: 

Thursday, March 10, 2016

How Close Is Too Close In Writing? Haven Kimmel

When novelist and poet, Haven Kimmel wrote her first memoir, A Girl Named Zippy, the granddaughters of her ex-third grade teacher, were not happy. Perhaps it was because she referred to their still-living grandmother as "the meanest woman in the history of Mooreland Elementary School.

At any rate, they sued. 

Kimmel, undaunted, collected depositions from 50 other former third-graders, who, it seems, agreed with the description. She faxed these to Doubleday, who sent them on to the granddaughters.

They dropped the suit. 

Good thing the crazy neighbor who wore the same dress 23 days in a row and "clacked her false teeth together like a castanet," had already died. No surviving relatives took offense. 

Presidents, Strokes, Wishful Thinking, and the movie "Dave."

With the U.S. President slurring words, calling origins "oranges," and looking more and more like someone who continues to have a series of small ischemia or mini-strokes, I felt profoundly sad. Clearly, there is no one--no Republican, no one in power--willing to state the truth about the clear deterioration of Donald Trump's physical and mental health. 

That led us to "Dave," a film where the president has a stroke and evil counselors replace him with a look-alike lightweight. 

But since this is a fairytale, that lightweight, played by Kevin Kline, grows in gravitas, gaining allies through sheer kindness, while reminding his staff that the president works for the people, and should care far more about their needs than his/her own. 

And yet, we weren't really able to escape into this charming film, written by David Ross and directed by Ivan Reitman, this Frank Capra vision of ethical people facing down villains, while inspiring others to regain their lost ethics. The shadow of our nation's current politics stretched over the fantasy movie.  If only. . .

Empty Nesting, Mallard-style

It's early autumn, the days growing shorter, the nights cooler.  School has started for everyone. I stopped my bike ride around the lake to watch this lonely female, brooding. Clearly, she has Empty Nest syndrome. 

After the verdict, Officer Geronimo Yanez.

I wrote this blog post a year ago. I'm not certain why I didn't post it. It's late, but I'm going to post it today.

Yesterday morning, I had to tackle a complex cat box problem involving a dog, a closed litter box, coats and scrubbing the front hall floor on my hands and knees. It haven't been able to watch the video yet, the video where Philando is shot within four seconds of the interaction beginning.I have the luxury of not watching it happen, of refusing to witness, of sweeping up kitty litter and wiping the floor. Diamond Reynolds doesn't. She must see it happening again and again. Her little girl doesn't. she must wake from nightmares of seeing that "pretty good guy who cared about us" get bullets in the heart, because somebody was terrified of his skin. 

I put it off as long as I could. I folded laundry and watched a sit com. I took the kids swimming. I made mashed potatoes from scratch. Finally, though, I sat down and watched the video Diamond Reynolds sits handcuffed in the back of the car, stunned, wailing, numb, horrified, while her little daughter tries to comfort her--and keep her calm, "so you won't get shotted, too." 

I made grilled cheese sandwiches.  I swept the kitchen floor. I pickled some watermelon rind--an experiment with a recipe from 1870. Then, I watched, very tiny on my phone, a small section of Diamond Reynolds being questioned by police--the part where they told her that her boyfriend, Philando Castile was dead, the part where she wailed, that hoarse, painful wail with all its overtones, the one you make when everything is lost, when you have nothing, when you feel once again a helpless child--like the helpless child her daughter was in the police car. I quickly hit the side button that switched my phone to darkness.  

In the afternoon, I heard the interview on NPR--the one where the juror explains how they reached their not-guilty decision. I was slicing apples for the kids, a steady chop, chop chop. "We took the emotion of out it," the juror said, before explaining that once they deadlocked, once that judge sent them back, they figured he wouldn't let them go before they reached an agreement. 

So they found the officer not guilty. They didn't want to be stuck in the deliberating room for any more days.

The juror said,  "Well, he seemed like a pretty honest guy."

"Wait," said the interviewer, startled. "You mean Philando Castile?"

"No." The white juror's flat Midwestern accent sounded ordinary and calm. "The officer."

He meant Jeronimo Yanez, the police officer with the puffy, young face, the one who changed his story from "I couldn't see it" (the gun) to "He was pulling it out," to "He had a c-grip." The officer who cried during his testimony, saying he feared for his life. The officer who, he testified, thought he had to shoot Philando because there was "second-hand smoke" in the car, and if Phil would smoke around a child, he was dangerous. 

But the juror's take from all that confusion, from watching the video of Yanez panic, tell Philando contradictory things and kill him within seven seconds of the mention of Phil's concealed carry, was that Yanez "seemed a pretty honest guy." 

My child came in and turned off the radio. I kept slicing apples, and sobbing.  I had the luxury of sobbing in the kitchen over apple slices. My child could come in and turn off the radio mid-interview. My kids didn't see their dad shot because of the color of his skin.  My husband doesn't have to worry, as the father of the adorable baby we met at a protest does, "Now that I have a baby, it's not safe for me to drive anymore. I can't afford to have a cop shoot me because of a broken tail light." We are white, and in this country, we are (mostly) safe.

A reporter that I much admire wrote today, "I can't take all this depressing news. I'm only looking at images of cute cats and adorable puppies." I can relate. I'm certain that during WWII, many in Poland, in France, in Germany turned their backs on the news and decided to look, instead, at cute cats and adorable puppies. Jews didn't have that luxury there. People of color don't have it here. Why should the rest of us?

We have to watch the dash cam. We have to turn the radio back on. And more--we have to leave our comfort zone, let the anger when we hear the phrase "All white people" roll off our backs. We have to remind ourselves there's abundant reasons for it. We have to stay in the room. We have to hit the protests, join the organizations, we have to make absolutely certain that every family, brown or white, has the luxury of driving their cars, slicing their apples, folding their laundry, without fearing that one phone call or one broken tail light or one bad interaction with a police officer will leave us--or someone we love--dead. 

Christian Martyrs?

About forteen years ago, a white, Middle-class woman told me that whites were on the run and Christians were terribly persecuted. We were both in the gym at a nice hotel in the major city of our state--I, visiting for a family celebration, she for a football game and to see her son off to the military.

"Christians in this country, we're all being persecuted," she said as we plodded away on the stair master.

I listened, my face carefully wide-eyed. "Wow. That's terrible. What was it like? You were refused a job because of your religion? Or forced out because you're Christian?"

"Oh, no," she said.

I tried again. "Then--somebody wouldn't rent you an apartment? Or sell you a house?"

"No, no no," she said.

I was pretty sure this wasn't the case, but. . ."Then, they called you names and threatened you?"

"No. Of course not," she said.

"Well then how have you been persecuted?"

She leaped on it, her face redder than ever, and not from the exercise. "It's these judges.. These activist judges. Telling us we can't say Merry Christmas, taking away prayer in school. It's terrible. It's a sin."

I took a deep breath so I could reply without audible sarcasm. "Oh. You mean they won't let you tell other people how *they* have to live?"

"Yes." She was so relieved. Finally somebody understood. "Yes. Absolutely. These activist judges are persecuting us."

Just like Saint Euphemia, (above) supposedly thrown to the lions for refusing to sacrifice at the altar of Ares, this woman is being forbidden to throw others to the lions. Persecution. Right?

Trump's Negotiating Tactics Per Prime Minister Trumball Phone Call

Now that someone has leaked the transcript of Trump's first phone conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, I thought I'd let you hear the unredacted version--see above.