Month: September 2016

I like some of Neil Diamond’s songs, especially his early music. He recorded a song called “Shiloh” about an imaginary friend. Haunting and chilling. But he also recorded a song called Song Sung Blue which is about music and singing. There’s a line in that song: “You can sing it with a sob in your voice.”

That gave me something to think about. Elvis was the first mainstream singer to sing just like that!! He had crossed the color line.

When Elvis was in his early days I was a little bit too young to appreciate him. Somewhere along the line I bought a CD of all his number one hits. Lots and lots of great songs on that album but what I’m driving at is the fact that a lot Elvis’ songs have a sobbing sound in them. I was entranced. Nobody will ever convince me that it’s just show biz. It was natural and it was the way he sang his songs.

So many great songs–In The Ghetto, It’s Now Or Never, Kentucky Rain, Jailhouse Rock, and his signature song, The Wonder Of You. Particularly moving for me is In The Ghetto where he sings the line–“…and his mama cries.” Sung purely, from the south.

I have an album by Stevie Wonder–actually I have two. One is called Musicquariam and Michael loved to listen to it when we drove places. We listened to “You Haven’t Done Nothing,” “You Had Me On The Front Line,” another about which the title escapes me but it had lines like this: Believers/Don’t Stop Believing, Sleepers, Just stop sleeping. Michael, whose mind was always a sponge, took in the words and meanings of these songs. It was the first time he was made to know that in Vietnam and probably WWII, black soldiers were placed on the “front lines” and got killed before the white soldiers. Ah yes, the way we educate our children. But it’s a good way to learn. The poet in him responded strongly to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, which I wrote about already. My other Stevie Wonder album has “I Was Made To Love Her,” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” So full of soul.

I may have to devote a whole blog to the Beatles. You can’t write about the Beatles in one blog entry. What I’ll start out by saying is that the first bunch of their songs–“I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” “If I Fell (In Love With You)” was a cry of liberation. My parents laughed at me for liking the Beatles but suddenly nobody cared what their parents thought about liking the Beatles. We heard the cry of freedom. We had a voice. Listening to their albums–Rubber Soul comes to mind–had the effect of maneuvering our brain processes. Something was coming out of those songs, composed by two working class young men from Britain, that molded us and charted a course. I remember feeling mildly disturbed when first listening to Rubber Soul. I didn’t really understand some of the lyrics but my brain pulled all of it in anyway.

I started liking Gordon Lightfoot in the mid-seventies. When I was living on Ward Street, I had an album of his called Cold on The Shoulder. I think I played that album every day and sometimes more than once a day.

It’s a comforting kind of words and singing. He wrote a song called “Rainbow Trout”
which is really about a lost girl, trying to find her way in this world. It was painful but comforting at the same time. I was that girl.

Then he had a double album called “Gord’s Gold.” Still one of my favorite albums, ever. There’s a song about building the railroad across Canada–I think he’s Canadian. “All the battles have been won, all the races have been run, on the mountain top we stand, all the world at our command.” I may have mixed up the words a little but he’s singing about how it feels to have arrived at a point in life where your own personal battles have been won. As I aged I would think about that. It’s not a rat race anymore and if you can live with the choices you’ve made and what fate has dealt you, you’re OK.

Now this may not sound like the person I am but I like Led Zeppelin. I hope I spelled that right. I’ve never heard anybody scream like Robert Plant. I have a tough side of me that wants to plunge down and find out what’s really there in the darkness. When I listened to Led Zeppelin I was on my way there. Then, years later, I heard Robert Plant being interviewed on the radio. He had a quiet speaking voice, spoke with a British accent, and talked about his family. The interviewer was expecting something very different and he said: “That’s the persona I put on to perform. The minute everything’s over I become who I really am–a nice, law-abiding, upper middle class Englishman.”

Here I am, sitting in my desk chair, just having listened to Curtis Mayfield singing People Get Ready. And I’m owning up to the fact that music is a big part of me. For one thing, despite a lot of kinds of craziness, during our growth to adulthood we had the music. Nobody can argue with that and it was our Bible, our guide, gave us a philosophy with which to live, and gave us love. Love was the best part of our music.

How did I decide to listen to Curtis Mayfield singing People Get Ready? I have the Springsteen CD “Wrecking Ball” and near the end Bruce sings a song about a train carrying everybody, sinners included, with “bells of freedom ringing.” How that man can write and sing. At the end of this song he sings a few words from People Get Ready and a beautiful black woman with all soul in her voice joins his. So he’s not cheating, what he’s doing is honoring Curtis Mayfield.

Which again puts me back to, of all people, Janis Joplin. While my husband was away for several days I watched a documentary about her life. I was never a real fan of hers; she seemed possessed by a demon and she scared me. But I listened to her shrieking about a man taking another little piece of heart. And of course my mother’s heart cried along with her and wanted to shelter her in some way. She told everybody she was off heroin but wanted just one more hit…

When I allow soul music to penetrate my heart I always wonder about what black people would think of me, a white woman, protected, with a brave son who would fight for healing– instead of slowly making that long trip downwards into drugs and violence. Did I have the right to enjoy their music without walking the walk? A question that will never be answered.

And I watched on you tube Curtis Mayfield singing People Get Ready. At the end, in front of a white audience, he says “Is everybody enjoying themselves tonight?” It may be just show biz but I like to think he knew that his music was for everyone.

Books can be the best companions. When I was 24 years old, having gone through a divorce, my mother through me out of her house. We were going through one of our periods of intense hatred. The truth hurts when you write it down like that but unfortunately it’s true. I ended up with a clerical job in Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital, living by myself.

I had no friends then and I didn’t want any. Human relations were beyond me; I could barely think, let alone relate to others. So I taught myself to enjoy my own company. Once I told Michael that it’s a good thing to learn to enjoy solitude because you never know when you might be left on your own to make your way in this world.

My books were my stability; just like Sharon in Buying A Year I put them in double rows on my kitchen shelves, removing the doors. I had them all placed in a way that would enable me to see my favorite ones first, when I entered the kitchen.

Lawrence wrote a lot about solitude; he became my spirit guide. I re-read many of his books and thought a lot about them. Physically I was here, living in Oakland and working at Mercy Hospital but my soul was wandering freely. It was very, very pleasant and rewarding. Most of all, I was learning. And even when I wasn’t happy, I kept telling myself that I was building something. This turned out to be true.

Mostly during that time I read volumes of Lawrence’s collected letters. He wrote masses of letters to his friends as he traveled, trying to find a place where he could fit in. It was in these letters that he stated his opinions about people needing to learn to stand alone. But these same thoughts could be found in his novels and poems. I can’t think of a better companion to keep by my side during this journey.

The Rainbow & Women in Love

DHL wrote these two books having a link in mind. Some of the characters get carried over from The Rainbow into Women in Love; but the two novels are very different in structure.
The Rainbow is the story of the Brangwen family, living in the farmland surrounding the area where Lawrence grew up. They are well-to-do farm people and Lawrence makes sure through his superb descriptive powers that the Brangwens feel tied to the sun, the seasons of the year, and to the farm animals they raise. Lawrence makes sure that you know that they live through “blood consciousness,” not mental exertion. They are healthy, hearty, and natural.

Ursula Brangwen, along with her younger sister Gudrun, are the children whose lives Lawrence develops up until the end of The Rainbow. Then in Women in Love they are pictured as grown women. The plot of Women in Love centers around the two sisters and the men they love. These two men and how they manage their friendship is an important part of the book, a key to understanding Lawrence and his struggles.

This is based on reality. Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda, were close friends with the critic John Middleton Murray and his wife, the writer Katherine Mansfield. DHL used dynamics that developed between the four people as material for Women in Love.
Lawrence surely must have angered his two friends. In the novel they are pictured as undeveloped, emotionally unstable, destructive of each other. The characters based on himself and Frieda are healthy, able to give and receive love, complex but happy. Lawrence has said that Women in Love is his favorite novel. There is humor, lovely descriptions of women’s clothes, and a very strange scene that takes place at night, when the “Lawrence character” is standing by a pool in a forest. The full moon, reflected in the water, angers the man for some odd reason and he begins to throw stones at the moon’s reflection. This reflection is shattered, over and over, but always re-weaves itself and remains stable. Critics have had a “field day” over this scene, saying that it’s a sign of Lawrence’s unbalanced mind regarding women. But I say that writers write and even they don’t know everything about what they write.

Lawrence was a restless soul. He and his wife traveled the world, exploring different types of society in Australia, Italy, the United States and other places as well. Lawrence never felt he truly belonged anywhere and he kept seeking refuge and strong male leadership in various societies. However, he ended up as the person who he was when he was born.
Lawrence was always poor and lived on what he earned through his writing. As people in the creative arts know, there rarely is a steady paycheck. So when he and his wife traveled they took the cheapest form of transportation and lived just like the poor people–the peasants–wherever he’d landed.
Lawrence loved Italy, not Rome or Florence; he felt at home in the hilly regions of northern Italy where people worked on small family farms. They called him Lorenzo. This was a kind of sign of respect because he was always friendly with the Italian peasants and–for a while–made himself a part of things in the village. They ate the crude, farm-grown fruits and vegetables and grains found in the village, and DHL always baked his own bread. They were included in all the religious festivals.
DHL loved the Italians for what the British lacked–naive warmth, vitality, openness. He described in his many travel writings the Italian men, how they adored their wives and children and took naturally the fruits of the earth. How Lawrence longed for these qualities. He stayed in Italy a long time. That’s where Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written, in the Villa Mirenda in northern Italy. Frieda, his wife, wrote that Lawrence composed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, writing in the “blue books” of students, sitting on the ground, his back against a pine tree. He was so still that little creatures like iguanas ran quickly over his legs. For a while, he was not a misfit. But then the tuberculosis got the better of him and he died in a sanitorium in Vence, France.
Why do I love this man, what he wrote and what he stood for? I have something in common with him. I’m a restless spirit also who never quite fits in. My restlessness has been cured by finding this farm to live on. But do I actually “fit in” here? Lawrence took his manuscript to a small Italian publisher called Pino Orioli, knowing no English publisher would touch it. Lawrence explained that the book was about sexual behaviors between two lovers. When Orioli told his workers, speaking Italian because they did not speak English, their remark was…”But we do it every day.”

This is my last blog entry today. I could go on and on, and I probably will.
When I was a troubled teenager I went through a period of extreme unhappiness and didn’t want to be who I was. Every day I went to school and it was almost unbearable. What gave me the courage to go on was this little paperback book that held two novellas by DHL. One was called “St. Mawr” and the other was “The Man Who Died.” I carried this book to school every day and it was like a shield.
Mentioned earlier is something about an upper class woman having a better relationship with a stallion than her husband. St. Mawr is the horse’s name and this beast was pure Lawrence…its color was gold and red, it was wild and few people could handle it. The horse was responsible for killing one groom and maiming several other people. So a lot of people get together and demand that the horse be shot. St. Mawr was considered a menace to society. Lou, the major character, doesn’t actually love this horse; she’s overcome with a desire to preserve it and give it the respect she feels is coming to it. So she takes St. Mawr away from upper class society and goes to live in New Mexico, alone except for her mother and two hired men. She has washed her hands of polite society forever and just wants to be alone and serve the forces of nature. These themes occur, over and over in DHL’s works…in this case the powers of nature are centered in the horse. Lawrence loved sunshine–many British people do–and sometimes the sun is almost a character in his stories.
In “The Man Who Died” DHL gives his own story of the resurrection of Jesus. He rises from the dead, cold and sick and makes his way to a peasant’s house. The peasant and his wife are shocked to the core to see Jesus. Jesus asks if he could just lay down on the grass and sleep in the sun for a while, and to not tell anybody he’s alive. So these good people agree and Jesus starts to recuperate while enjoying the hot sun. While he’s there he watches a brilliant cock, shining gold with a red comb on his head, really beautiful. This cock is tied by one leg to a post and the poor bird tries and tries to get free but can’t. When Jesus thinks it’s time to move on, he asks the peasant if he could have the cock and take it with him. They are still stunned by all of this and agree. After walking along deserted roads he sees a small farm with a bunch of hens. He lets the cock go free and feels very happy. Lots of Lawrence’s themes present themselves. Both are life-giving stories which soothed my broken heart.

Before I write about Sons & Lovers I have to put in some biographical notes about Lawrence himself.

His father was a coal miner and his mother was from a professional class of people; she “married down” because she was entranced by Arthur Lawrence’s vitality and warmth. See how this theme, from DHL’s own life, gets transmitted to his writing?

DHL wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the setting where he himself grew up.

Lawrence had a “mother fixation,” also an intense Oedipus complex. His mother was at fault; she was alienated from her husband who turned out to be a cruel bully who paid no attention to his family. So she drew her young son to her and they became companions; Lawrence has written, in one of the many biographies I’ve read, that yes–he and his mother loved each other like lovers. No actual sex took place unless Lawrence hid the fact skillfully. However, the two slept in the same bed and this topic of shared sleep comes up, over and over, in Lawrence’s writing. In many DHL books, if a couple can really share sleep then they’re doing well. The couples who can’t sleep well together in the same bed are not doing so well. A hangup of his.

As a byproduct of being a “Mama’s boy” to the max, DHL became a quite competent housekeeper. He could cook well, do laundry, bake his own bread, even put up fruit and vegetables that he grew–because he was always near his mother. He learned all these things by watching her. When he was married to Frieda Weekly he did all the housekeeping, even served his wife breakfast in bed.

Sons & Lovers is almost 100% autobiographical. It seems that once DHL “got this book out of his system” he was liberated and reached a new level in his writing. He had written one or two minor novels but they were mildly successful and did not attract attention. After Sons & Lovers all that changed. One or two real-life people who were characters in the novel were outraged and hurt, though. Writers have a way of doing this.

…and more about Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The nurse who comes to live at Wragby is called Mrs. Bolton. She’s the one who brings new life energy to Clifford.

There’s a scene in this book that I couldn’t understand when I was young. In the novel, Constance and Mrs. Bolton are sorting through one of the “lumber rooms” in Wragby. We would call them the attic rooms. While doing so—by the way, Mrs. Bolton has guessed that Constance is in love with Mellors but protects her privacy–they find a curious object that obviously was bought by a long-ago Chatterley, then left in the lumber room, unused. Lawrence describes this object–a large, decorated box that opens and then opens further, like those doll eggs from Russia–with loving care. You can really “see” it. It holds medicine bottles, a manicure set, stationery and pens, never used, a sewing and darning set plus other small practical items. Its many doors close up and the whole thing fits together. Mrs. Bolton goes out of her mind with joy upon examining it and can’t stop praising it; Constance, being a nice, sweet woman impulsively gives it to the nurse.

Now why this long description of something found unused in a dull attic room? I never knew this until I began to write myself. I think DHL, like a lot of writers, just liked writing!! He obviously had seen this box someplace and liked it. So he put it in the book to show Constance’s generous nature. At this point, when the two women are enjoying themselves, they come across the ancient rosewood cradle of the Chatterley family. That’s another small detail but lovely; Constance stares at it and Mrs. Bolton comments that it’s a shame that it wouldn’t be of use now because Clifford is impotent. Connie says that “she may have a child one day.” And Mrs. Bolton is thinking that she’s aiming at having a child by Mellors–put into the old aristocratic cradle of the Chatterley family!!! She takes joy in this which is a whole different issue.

As a novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is beautifully constructed, but it’s also a poem. Like a lot of good things in life, it’s complex.

There are scenes in the book that at first don’t make sense and I couldn’t grasp their importance. What did they mean? Eventually I realized that as a writer I get obsessed by certain topics and ideas and I eventually write about them.

There’s a very important line that comes from George Orwell’s 1984:

“If there is any hope, it will come from the proles.”

In that book, the proles are working class people, free of the Party’s forces. They go about their days, working, the women doing laundry and hanging it up on their clotheslines, enjoying a rare sunny day. The Party, led by Big Brother, is mega-brutal and strikes swiftly at anybody who breaks even the smallest regulations. There’s even a Thought Police–you can’t get any further than that. You’re not even allowed to think thoughts that don’t follow the rules.
How does this relate to Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Clifford and Constance are living in a sterile environment, closed off from life. Servants wait on them and Clifford owns the coal company. Cut off from anything natural and freely given, they are both spiritually bankrupt.
At the same time, two things happen. Constance becomes exhausted from Clifford’s demands that she listen all the time to the stories her husband is writing; also it is she that gives Clifford all the physical help he needs. Constance becomes ill, writes to her sister, asking for assistance. In the end, Constance’s sister comes to “Wragby”…the ancestral home…and arranges for a trained nurse to live at Wragby and take total care of Clifford. He is at first angry that Constance is giving up taking personal care of him; but he gradually improves and benefits by this nurses’ presence. That is what George Orwell means about hope coming from the proles. They are the ones who bring vitality to the sterile environment of the aristocracy. With Constance it is the same. She takes long walks in the “wood” and meets Mellors, a man working at a lower class job, having left the army. He brings new vitality to Constance, and anybody who is reading this, please do not see this a a cheap answer to a complex problem. It is not “just sex.” It’s what life is about. This is what happened when I met Peter! He’s from a working class background while I’m from the middle class. I need to be married to a man like him. It can’t be fully explained; it just is.